Kentaro Otsuka, Shin-ichi Nishimura, Masateru Senge, Keigo Noda
Received 16 June, 2025
Accepted 8 September, 2025
Published online 6 December, 2025

Kentaro Otsuka¹⁾, Shin-ichi Nishimura²⁾, Masateru Senge³⁾, Keigo Noda⁴⁾

1) The United Graduate School of Agricultural Science, Gifu University, Japan
2) Faculty of Applied Biological Sciences, Gifu University, Japan
3) Union-Infrastructure Maintenance Laboratory, Gifu University, Japan
4) Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the University of Tokyo, Japan

Agricultural water infrastructure management by land improvement districts (LIDs) has the primary purpose of irrigation and drainage for agricultural production. However, recent climate change and urbanization have necessitated additional operations for flood control, becoming an additional and significant burden to LIDs. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the changes in operational efforts of agricultural water infrastructure resulting from urbanization. The number of gate operations of the main canals was proposed as a quantitative index of the operational efforts. The number of gate operations in the past five years (1994–1998) and the present (2017–2021) were extracted from the management logbooks and classified by operation purpose based on rainfall intensity to analyze the effects of urbanization. The results showed that the number of gate operations can be applied as an indicator of operational effort. The operational efforts for flood control purposes have increased because of urbanization. In contrast, the operation effort for irrigation remained the same as before, even if the number of paddies decreased due to urbanization. These results prove that urbanization is increasing the operational efforts of agricultural water infrastructure by LID.

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