Abstract
In Taiwan, the total scale of agro-forestry foothill zones and indigenous reserves, reaches to 260,000 hectares, this has a great potential for the development of Satoyama Industry.However, due to the factors, such as outmigration of young people and the aging condition of the land managers, the Satoyama landscapes and traditional industries within the indigenous areas are facing the threat of disintegration. Aiming at the mountain villages and their surrounding agricultural and forestry industries, this project plans to set up an evaluating indicator and standard, and a selecting system, to choose ideal candidates for Satoyama Industry development. Based on the three approaches and five key points of Satoyama Initiative, this project will also aim at the possible candidate mountain villages to establish an evaluation database to determine if these villages surely have the potential for that development. The list of various data, ranging from traditional ecological knowledge, ecological environmental characteristics, the changes in land use, the historical and current industrial development, social, economic and other related information and charts, etc., will be used for evaluation purpose. After the collected information has been integrated into various resources and environmental layers by the geographic information system, local traditional ecological knowledge then can be recharged for future applications. Especially in the agro-forestry production and ecotourism industries, coupled with emerging concepts such as food forests, this project hopes to discover sites that have the potential for Sotoyama development, as well to designate villages for community demonstration, in order to promote the community-based sustainable management in Taiwan.