Just a 20-minute walk from Hanno Station in Saitama Prefecture is Mount Tenran, a 197-meter peak that looks more like a big hill than a mountain. Nevertheless, it’s a popular destination for day hikes and holds a special place in the community, with a local sake brewery paying tribute to the summit by naming its signature tipple after it.
Mount Tenran is also part of the approximately 1,000 monitoring sites across Japan where fixed-point observations of the status of flora and fauna are conducted. This project is spearheaded by the Environment Ministry and overseen by nature conservation groups and research organizations with the help of thousands of volunteers.
Called Monitoring Sites 1,000, the ambitious initiative, launched in 2003, aims to track the ecosystems of locations deemed important for biodiversity conservation over a period of 100 years. The sites are spread across alpine belts, forests and grasslands, freshwater zones, coastal areas, sandy beaches, coral reefs and small islands.
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