Print PageResidential site development brings about negative effects such as a decrease in the natural area, the extinction of wild animals and plants, and an increase in CO©üemission. The accumulation of these negative effects threatens sustainable development. The goal of this study was to make a method of ecosystem value assessment in a development area in South Korea. A literature review and relevant case study on various landscape ecological indices were conducted to determine the practical indicators. A numerical weight or priority is derived from each element of the hierarchy, using Analytic Hierarchy Process. Assessment criteria and scales for each index are developed through an expert interview.
Results/Conclusions
Stability, the degree of naturalness, diversity, rarity, and vulnerability were determined to be the main categories. The weights of each category are 0.29, 0.24, 0.19, 0.16, and 0.12, respectively. Each category has indicators and each of the weights are as follows: stability (habitat size (0.39), connectivity (0.46), carbon dioxide uptake (0.15)), the degree of naturalness (naturalness of undeveloped area(0.68), naturalness of development area (0.32)), diversity (species diversity (0.67), landscape diversity (0.33)), rarity (species rarity (0.52), habitat rarity (0.48)), vulnerability (negative edge effect(0.44), carbon dioxide emission (0.25), climate vulnerability (0.30)). As a result, the assessment method appears to be effective that not only overcome limitations of the environmental impact assessment, but also maintain the natural ecosystem in land development districts.
This work was supported by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) grant funded by the Korea government(MEST) (No. R01-2008-000-20348-0)
