Remote Sensing and Ecosystem Management in Korea

한국에서의 원격탐사와 생태계 관리

A Nationwide survey of ecosystem in the Republic of Korea was accomplished from 1986 to 1990 and in that survey, GIS and remote sensing were used partially. This was done by the Ministry of Environment(MOE), which introduced remote sensing and GIS for environment management in late 1980's. Especially the National Institute of Environmental Research (NIER) are under the research on systematization of environmental information with an ultimate goal of application of GIS and remote sensing to environmental impact assessment. Although the Korean peninsula is in a non-tropical zone, we introduce two case studies on remote sensing applications to ecosystem managements in the Republic of Korea. One is a study on change detection in urban vegetation of Seoul with Landsat data and the other is a study on detection of insect damaged pine tree area using Landsat TM data. The techniques involved and the conclusion from these studies were relevant to vegetation studies in tropical ecosystem.