Kazuharu Mizuno is a physical geographer and a professor in the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan, following nearly 20 years as an associate professor of the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University. He graduated from the Department of Geography at Nagoya University and earned his master’s degree in the Graduate School of Environmental Science at Hokkaido University. He obtained his doctoral degree in the Department of Geography, the Graduate School of Science at Tokyo Metropolitan University.He has researched the vegetation and environments of the Japan Alps and the Daisetsuzan Mountains of Japan; glacial fluctuation and vegetational successions in tropical high mountains (Mount Kenya, Kilimanjaro, and the Andean Cordillera); natural environments and human activities in the Namib Desert of Namibia; and nature, culture, and society of the Arunachal Pradesh of India. He is a co-author of Himalayan Nature and Tibetan Buddhist Culture in Arunachal Pradesh, India (Springer, 2015).Yuya Otani is a researcher at the Institute for Water Science, Suntory Global Innovation Center Ltd. His research interests include watershed hydrogeology, stable isotope hydrology, and regional studies. At the Tokyo University of Agriculture, he investigated the effects of chemical fertilizer substances on the sea area using stable isotopes in coral skeletal annual rings at Yoron Island, Kagoshima, Japan.As his doctoral research at the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, he worked on the effects of glacier shrinkage on the water environment surrounding Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro using oxygen and hydrogen stable isotopes and regional surveys. He is a member of the Association of Japanese Geographers and Japan Association for African Studies
