Nature Observatory

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Nature: 180 Live Cameras

National parks, wetlands, lakes, old-growth forest. Cameras that show the landscape itself — nothing is about to happen, and that is the point.

Sample frame from Lake Ozenuma (August 2026)
Lake Ozenuma · Sample August 2026

What you can see

These are the slow cameras. Where volcano and river cameras exist to catch something going wrong, these sit in Environment Ministry nature parks and at university and research observation sites. Some are essentially an afterthought bolted to equipment measuring how much carbon dioxide a forest is absorbing.

Most refresh hourly rather than streaming. But a still image arguably shows the day's light better than video does. Three frames — morning, midday, evening — and the colour of a marsh or the reflection on a lake are completely different things.

Wetlands, raised bogs, caldera lakes, beech forest, dunes. Japan packs an unusual range of these into a small area, so opening them in order from Hokkaido down to Kyushu shows the same season sliding across the latitudes.

Cameras you can watch now: 180

100 video, 80 still. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

Hokkaido11

Aomori3

Iwate2

Miyagi2

Akita1

Yamagata2

Fukushima3

Tochigi2

Gunma1

Kanagawa1

Toyama2

Ishikawa3

Fukui1

Nagano5

Yamanashi1

Shizuoka3

Shiga1

Kyoto9

Nara1

Tottori1

Okayama1

Kumamoto2

Oita1

Kagoshima1

United States38

South Korea12

Iceland4

Norway5

Taiwan37

South Africa4

Canada5

Kenya3

Costa Rica2

DR Congo2

Botswana2

Panama2

Kagawa1

Okinawa1

Elsewhere2

When to watch

Autumn colour, October into November, is the clearest change of the year. It starts in late September in Hokkaido's Daisetsuzan range and takes about six weeks to work down through Tohoku and the central highlands to western Japan. Open several in the same week and you can watch the front move.

Winter swaps the picture entirely, depending on whether snow falls. Wetlands go white and only the shapes of trees remain. Once the snow sets in, a camera may ice over and show nothing for days — that is not a fault, it happens every year.

For time of day, aim for the half hour either side of sunrise. A still morning turns a lake into a mirror, and in autumn radiative cooling fills a marsh with fog until only the tops of the trees show.

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Agencies publishing the cameras on this page

The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.

To find other cameras, go to the camera list. You can narrow the cameras by format, region, subject and provider.