These days, we can see many constructions like urban industrializations, the growth of cities, housing land developments, and road establishments. Due to those constructions, ecological sources, such as industries, rivers, and green spaces, were destr...
These days, we can see many constructions like urban industrializations, the growth of cities, housing land developments, and road establishments. Due to those constructions, ecological sources, such as industries, rivers, and green spaces, were destroyed and damaged. As a result, ecosystem in Korea has problems with ecological environment, including dramatically reduced habitats to balance ecosystems and weakened ecological health. Accordingly, preservation and management of wildlife habitats remain to be important issues. As the importance of eco-space, one of the ways to cope with environmental challenges like climate change, is emphasized, concerns about wetlands -considered as wastelands- have been growing. With a focus on these problems, the government conducts wetland cataloging projects and it recently constructs inventory about small palustrine wetlands like village wetlands.
This study was conducted to grasp the distribution of village wetlands in Asan City and their ecological characteristics and to suggest adaptive management plans for establishing conservation strategies. For this study, Asan City was diveded into 3 Regions, 2 Eups (smaller Regions), 9 Myeons (smaller Eups), and 6 Dongs (smaller Eups) - Onyang urban area. In addition, the potential place for a village wetland was chosen in Asan City, using GIS techniques, and the village wetlands were laid out with optimal village wetland standards from interior survey, literature research, and field survey.
This study defined millage wetlands as "A wetland is located at a village and in the neighborhood of a village, related to daily lives or farming and called palustrine, wetlands, village bangjuk, agricultural reservoir or small reservoir. " Main factors for current status investigation were as follows : location, function, and types of wetlands, Asan Bay - the hydrological feature in Asan City, and constructed wetlands revealed by fish farm and floodplain.
As a result, 807 potential wetlands for village wetlands in Asan City were found, using Arc-Gis 10.1. Ultimately, 101 village wetlands inventories in Asan City were established from satellite map, Korean Land Information System, land use, land cover, and field survey.
Functions of wetlands were assessed with final selected 101 village wetlands in Asan City, in accordance with site selecting criteria through detailed investigation. Ecological characteristics were found, conservation values were evaluated, and useful applying plans were presented. As a result of RAM evaluation on 35 village wetlands with detailed investigation. it was found that 8 places were for 'high rating' in functional assessment, 18 places for 'moderating rating' and 9 places for 'low rating'.
According to functional assessments, places for 'moderating rating' were the most. In this regard, general wetlands cannot be thought to be healthy. Hence, additional strategies for preservation and management are needed with 'high rating' wetlands. 9 places for 'low rating' would be required for management plans on every wetland case to improve wetland functions.
As a way to preserve and manage ecologically important village wetlands, this study suggests to use existing GIS/DB as basic data on land ecological assessment like ecological zoning map. Existing ecological zoning map is limited within major wetlands and ecological valued village wetlands are mostly rated as requiring development and usage. Therefore, to reflect regional ecology features efficiently, evaluations with little but valuable information about village wetlands are needed to be done.