Message from the Director-General | Founding Mission and Goals | Features of RIHN | Medium-term Goals and Plans | Organization | Communication of Research Results | Facilities

Research rooms on the RIHN campus are designed to provide a sense of openness. The design concept is to allow implemented projects to be loosely interconnected as they occur in one large curved space 150 meters in length. The facilities help external researchers as well as RIHN research staff to meet one another, since they are designed with the maximization of shared use in mind. At the center of the main building, a library and computer room are located for the convenience of many users, and three common rooms are provided for casual discussions. On the basement floor, a cluster of fully functional laboratories has been designed with emphasis on convenience for shared use, as with the research rooms.

The separate RIHN House is a guesthouse. The assembly hall and a dining lounge located to the left of the house entrance serve as meeting spaces for the RIHN staff as well as for guests.

Appropriately for an institution researching the global environment, RIHN is housed in a tile-roofed building suited to the Kyoto landscape, where as many as possible of the trees already on the site have been retained. Lighting and air-conditioning also employ the latest designs to minimize the building's impact on the environment. The design has won acclaim, receiving awards from the Illumination Engineering Institute of Japan, the Japan Institute of Architects, the Green Building Award from MIPIM Asia, and the Architectural Institute of Japan.

Laboratories

RIHN research projects are multidisciplinary and multi-method; in common they share the need for high quality physical observation and chemical and biological analysis of the surface environments of the earth. As a national institute, RIHN houses eighteen basement laboratories designed to address this need. There are state-of-the-art laboratories dedicated to microscopic, DNA and stable isotope analysis. Additional facilities include two fieldwork preparation rooms for storage and maintenance of observational and sampling equipment, three lowtemperature rooms for organism and ice core storage, three incubator rooms for storage of organisms requiring specific temperatures, and a clean room in which samples can be processed in a contamination-free environment.

Instruments

While individual projects make extensive use of specialized instruments, RIHN provides common access to the advanced instruments essential to contemporary environmental studies. In order to assure the proper use and care for this equipment, and to support its accessibility to the joint research of an inter-university research institute, the Division of Promotion maintains a manual of standard equipment and laboratory procedures. Stable isotope analysis has stimulated environmental science in recent years, and RIHN houses one of the most advanced laboratories for stable isotope analysis in Japan, as well as a range of support instrumentation. In order to facilitate access to the instruments, common consumable supplies are purchased collectively.

Management

Within the Center for Coordination, Promotion and Communication, the Division of Promotion manages and maintains the research facilities in cooperation with the research projects making use of them. About 200 people from 35 institutes used the RIHN laboratory facilities in fiscal 2009. As new research projects are established at RIHN each year, the Division of Promotion runs workshops several times a year in order to develop general understanding of the facilities and their procedures and enhance communication among lab workers. Laboratory procedures, instrument manuals and information relating to samples in storage are also available on the RIHN laboratory website. Beginning in 2010, the Division of Promotion will also conduct research into new technical methods in environmental studies.

Website of the laboratories

Stable isotope analysis describes how things are linked to one another, where they come from and how they change in contact with other elements and through time. It is a powerful tool in the study of contemporary biogeochemical processes as well as of deep historical change. In analyzing the stable isotopes of the varying elements present in ground-, river-, lake- and other waters of a particular landscape, for example, researchers can describe its original sources as well as the route and time it took to get to its present location. Such description can illuminate how mountain forests and soils contribute to the quality of rice grown on the plains below.