NOBUYUKI MINO

In kindergartens and day nurseries, when children are not well aware of their playgrounds and surroundings, it is particularly important that nursery school teachers and childcare workers should give them any words that give rise to their awareness of those existence so that they can connect their activity with their environment. This research, focusing on the nursery schools and day nurseries willingly applying environmental learning, attempted to identify the characteristics of words given by nursery school teachers and childcare workers which activate the place of environmental learning of infancy and the environmental design organising it. We recognised, through an analysis of the conversations between teachers and workers, and children, there, that the former most often gave the latter the word of 'Really!?' – this was used 104 times in the sum of 3106 words – and that they commonly gave them words responding positively to children such as the phrase that 'It's true! So that's something to look forward to eating it!'. Also, the features of teachers and workers' words contributing to an understanding of children's environment by using their five senses and drawing children's interest in the relation between plants and insects and in their growth were extracted from this analysis when applying cluster analysis to the words used over twenty times. With regard to the environmental design, furthermore, we found that plants and pot plants were placed where children can more often perceive them, for example.

The infant notices a lot of things and moves the heart through a relation with nature. In this research, we figured out the present situation of the natural experience with Five Senses at kindergarten and nursery center. As a result, experience through five senses of spring and summer is very active at a large number of kindergartens, but there are few experiences in autumn and winter, especially, there is clearly that the number of kindergarten which presents an experience to "eat" by a season except the summer is over 30 less than the number of it in summer. And also, from the following data, we understood that kindergartener and nursery staff does all kinds of things to fit a natural experience in the everyday life. 74.8% of all activity was performed in kindergartens. There was more the natural activity that they carried out on the sidelines of the regular life in kindergartens, for example, in walk time (37 activities), time for expression activity (81), and time for activities in garden (49).

areas and facilities use of mobility impaired people on takino suzuran hillside national park was discussed. Monitoring results of activity surveys for wheel chair users, powered wheel chair users, stick users and stroller users showed that powered wheel chair greatly contributed to improve accessibility of park facilities and programs. On the other hand, many facilities were still difficult for wheel chair user. These results were considered that various assistive technologies and management on walking distance would be effective tools for making accessible park.

GIS analysis applied to understand barrier-free environment at a regional scale. Significant regional inequalities in wheel-chair accessibilities and lack of linkage among the barrier infrastructures were identified through our analysis. Especially small-sized dairy facilities have tend to exclude from easy access areas. Poor accessibility to various facilities is the most serious barrier for segments of the disabled and aged population. Recent demographic trends in Japan make the accessibility improvement a compelling one. In the future regional planning, a holistic approach should be applied to accessibility inequalities, with the goal of reducing regional disparities in barrier free environment.

The objectie of this study is to propose a method for evaluating ecological network. We propose to consider two classes of spatial scales for evaluation. In the macro-scale research, we classified land use types by satellite data, and extracted two areas of heterogeneous or homogeneous land use in the object region In these areas, we performed micro-scale researches through field survey and geographical information based topographical maps. Throughout these researches of different spatial scales, we evaluated present ecological network and discussed the availability of this method.

Dragonfly species were surveyed in 23 small irrigation ponds in Hokudan-cho, Hyogo Prefectre in order to detect environmental factors influencing dragonfly distribution. Thirty-two species and 1066 individuals were observed from May to October 2001. The number of dragonfly species had no significant relation with water body area of irrigation ponds. Twenty-three ponds were classified to three types by TWINSPAN (Two-way Indicator Species Analysis). The result showed that neighboring woodlots and frequency of cutting glass around pond influenced the component of dragonfly species. Cutting glass is one of the important maintenances of irrigation ponds. It was suggested that the disturbance by traditional farm works such as cutting glass plays an important role to maintain dragonfly species richness on this area.

In this paper, the rural - urban integration through the use of allotment gardens was discussed. We investigated the allotment gardens users attributes, frequency in use, time-distance, contributable factors to users satisfaction, by the interview with 438 urban and rural allotment gardens participants. Results show that 1) Users age composition of urban allotment gardens is biased to 50's and 60's, whereas that of rural allotment gardens is more evenly distributed. 2) Only the farm products and works positively contributed to urban users satisfaction, whereas, community ties and rural landscape also positively contributed to rural allotment gardens users satisfaction. Those findings suggest that allotment gardens in rural areas can play a significant role in the formation and maintenance of the rural ・ urban integration.