제주 생물권보전지역 내 한라산국립공원의 경관분석

Abstract

The habitat fragmentation due to roads on small islands like Jeju may further aggravate habitat conditions and conservation efforts. Mt. Halla National Park(153.4 km²), distinguished for its high endemism and species diversity, serves as a core area of a biosphere reserve on Jeju Island located in the Korea Steait. This national park is also dominated by Mt. Halla, a polygenetic volcano with numerous parasitic volcanoes as the name suggest. The recently-increased number of roads and trails with the growth of tourism has been invoking concerns about the habitat conditions in this park. Thus we examined the fragmentation pattern due to roads in relation to its elevation, vegetation, and parasitic volcanoes using GIS systems. The park consists of ten patches divided by roads and legal trails. When a buffer of 112 m and 60 m was applied to roads and legal trails respectively, core and buffer zones of the park did not differ in the mean patch size. Regarding the elevation, we found out that the patch size was reduced by 95% at a rather high elevation. About half of 44 parasitic volcanoes were located within the 500 m vicinity of roads and legal trails. The results of severe fragmentation regardless of the zoning, patch size reduction at high elevation, and occurrence of parasitic volcanos in edge areas indicate that this designated core area may not function as a core area of the reserve, and rezoning the park and managing the roads are crucial for proper conservation, inparticular with the climate change.