The aim of this study is to develop a system for sustainable resources use planning and management fitting to conditions of each area in the hilly rural area of Japan. At the start, 1753 municipalities were classified by condition of industrial infrastructure. Then 3 types of system were developed Group-A is in worse economical and industrial condition, the system should be supported economically for infrastructure. As the Group-B, showing better agricultural productivity than A. The labour is organized on direct payment basis. At the municipalities classyfied as group-C and D, which located at better economical condition, the urbanized people who visit this area for recreational purposes can support the system.

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In this paper, we applied Delphi method to the evaluation of residential environment in hilly and mountainous areas in order to integrate the evaluation on statistics with the evaluation by informed residents.
We examined the effect of our method in Nakagawa Town and Irihirose Village. The results are as follows.
1. Our method converged the variance of informed residents' judgments.
2. Our method reduced the difference between the evaluation on statistics and the evaluation by informed residents.

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This study aims to clarify the most suitable spatial scale to analyze landscape structure for evaluating ecological functions. For this purpose, 7 spatial scales, 0 to 5 order watersheds and the community boundary, were compared in their abilities to explain the variety of physical or visual functions in the Told river catchment. In the results, larger order scales, especially 4th order watersheds, clearly reflected seen beauty, contrary to smaller orders, 0 to 2 order watersheds and the community boundary, which associated with physical functions, such as soil erosion or land slide protection. Units in larger order scales could be made from smaller scale units, especially the community boundary which could also analyze the activities of rural people. From these results, it was suggested that the community boundary was the most suitable scale to analyze landscape structure.

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At present, the significance of the hilled rural area is recognized from the viewpoint of ecological function of farmland and woodland. In this paper, based on such a background, the method to classify the conservation zone in the hilled rural area was investigated as a case study of Y village in Shimane Prefecture by evaluating function of national land conservation, evaluating the difficulty of maintaining settlement in the investegated area in groups according to settlement, and ranking both evaluation results respectively by means of overlay techniques in geographic information system (GIS).

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It is important in regional planning to make clear the characteristics of land-use. So in many studies, the relationships between land-use and geographical variables have been examined by building land-use change model and producing ‘average’ or ‘global’ parameter estimates which are assumed to apply equally over the whole region. But land-use has a spatial distribution, so it seems reasonable to assume that relationships might vary over space and that parameter estimates might exhibit significant spatial variation. In this study, we examined the relationships between the distribution of agricultural lands which are in steady state and geographical variables by Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) using lattice data. GWR produces localised parameter estimates which can exhibit a high degree of variability over space and indicate the presence of spatial nonstationality of the relationships.

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The study will identify the land use mechanism for the whole of Japan using a statistical method. The relations between physiographic conditions and socio-economic activities and between land use distribution and socio-economic activities were clarified by canonical correlation analysis. The results were as follows : 1) Conditions of variant topography limited the location for secondary and tertiary industries. 2) The higher density of population as well as secondary and tertiary industries were related to urban-land strongly. While farm household ratio and the percentage of aged people positively had strong relation to the percentage of forest land. 3) The land use mechanism remained unchanged between 1975 and 1990.

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Most parts of Japan are covered with forests that play multifunctional role in environmental conservation. Forest connectivity in the Japanese islands was evaluated by calculating a newly proposed index “CON” defined as the number of the neighboring forest grid cells in 3×3 grid cells, using a standard grid (approx. 1km grid cell) database of vegetation developed by the Japan Environment Agency. The results of our study indicated that the forests in Chugoku district are comparatively fragmented for its forest coverage ratio, and forest connectivity is strongly correlated to topographical factors.

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