This photographic journal shares highlights from an expedition I carried out in August 2018 with Dr Henrik Sjoman from the Gothenburg Botanic Garden and SLU Alnarp. Our research looks at the variation in functional traits in populations of Magnolia obovata, Magnolia salicifolia and Quercus mongolica var. grosseserrata, trees that frequently co-occur in Japan and the Kunashir Island in spite of their different evolutionary strategies. We selected our study sites based on an expedition I carried out to Kyushu and Honshu islands in April 2018 with Simon Hannus, and both expeditions were generously supported by The David Colegrave Foundation, The International Dendrology Society, The Merlin Trust, The Royal Horticultural Society, The Rhododendron, Camellia and Magnolia Group, and The University of Sheffield.
The story starts in Gifu University’s Takayama River Basin Research Station, high in the Japanese Alps. Henrik and I arrived in Tokyo on the 1st August and drove across to the eastern slopes of Mt Norikura, where we met Dr Yoshitake Shinpei and his colleagues to begin our research.
Our next stop was Kyushu University’s Shiiba Research Station in Miyazaki Prefecture on Kyushu Island, a fascinating landscape that sits on the faultline of two geological regions, high in the mountains. Because of its unique location and climate (it is the only cold temperate place on the island of Kysuhu) it has a flora that has elements of both warm and cold temperate bioregions: amongst the Magnolias and Rhododendrons, for example, we saw some Gardenia seedlings. An extraordinary place. We met Dr Takuo Hishi and his team and headed up to our study site, an abandonned copper mine at about 1,200m.
After our work in Shiiba, we drove north to Fukuoka, working in a very different climate. Here the climate is classified as warm temperate, although many cold temperate species that we would recognise are also distributed. Our target was Aburayama Forest, a forest that ranges over a large mountain to the south west of Fukuoka, about 450m at its peak.
Sadly we had to work very quickly in Aburayama as a typhoon was approaching and we didn’t know when we would need to take shelter in the city. Worse: as we sheltered from the storm that passed over the next few days our flight was cancelled, delaying our next leg on to Kaisho Forest, near Seto. This meant that our time there would be shortened too.
Once we had rescheduled our flights we met up with Professor James Hitchmough and headed into the forest. Because of the typhoon that had just passed and another on its way, we only had a day in the field here, so we made it a long one, getting into the forest as early as possible and staying as late as we could. The worst problem though was finding Magnolia salicifolia. Here, the individuals that we had found in the spring proved extremely difficult to positively identify as they were hybridising naturally with Magnolia stellata. Great to find a large and robust population of an endangered species but really problematic for us given our shortened time frames- the result was that we had to exclude this species from the study for this site, a great shame in the end.
From Kaisho Forest, our next stop was Kyushu University’s forest at the Ashoro Research Station in Hokkaido. Here the typhoons worked in our favour, giving us an extra day to explore before meeting Professor Masaaki Chiwa and Dr Takuma Nakamura.
Arriving at the research station, our first step was to collect the plant materials as quickly as possible and then process them in the laboratory along with all the material we collected in Aburayama and Kaisho.
After eight days with James and all too little time in the field, it was time to say goodbye and start the last leg of the expedition. We returned to Sapporo, James to fly back to Sheffield and for Henrik and me to fly to Sakhalin. After arranging a meeting at Hotel Lenina with Dr Liuba Kameneva and Dr Ilya Bogachyov from Vladivostok Botanic Garden, we then met up with Elena Linnik from the Kurilsk Nature Reserve at Yuzhno Korsakov, and boarded the ferry that would take us to Kunashir.