Members

As an ecologist, I am fascinated by enormous biodiversity and structure of tropical forests, and the understanding of tropical forest dynamics and underlying mechanisms is my life-long purpose. In the Hakubi project, I will try to deepen our understanding of the relationship between tropical forest ecosystems and human activities. In the human history, overuse of forests and subsequent environmental degradation have been a major driver of the collapses of civilizations. Why is sustainable forest use so difficult? Long-term forest responses to human activities have been poorly understood, which, I think, is a key for this question. Recent development of big data such as satellite imagery and information techniques allow us to discover new aspects of nature, which we could not elaborate in the past. I use these techniques in collaboration with traditional fieldwork to understand drivers underlying tropical forest dynamics disturbed by human activities.