Abstract
Korea needs proper and rational public policies on conservation and use of forest land and other natural resources because of the accelerating expansion of national land developments in recent years. Unfortunately, there is no systematic planning system to support the needs. Generally, forest land use planning needs suitability analysis based on efficient land classification system. The goal of this study was to classify a forest land using multivariate satistical methods. A case study was carried out in winter of 1983 on a mountainous area higher than 100m above sea level located at Mt. Kwanak in Anyang -city, Kyung-gi-do (province). The study area was 19.80 km$^2$wide and was divided into 1, 383 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTU's) by a 120m$\times$120m grid. Fourteen descriptors were identified and quantified for each OTU from existing national land data : elevation, slope, aspect, terrain form, geologic material, surface soil permeability, topsoil type, depth of the solum, soil acidity, forest cover type, stand size class, stand age class, stand density class, and simple forest soil capability class. For this study, a FORTRAN IV program was written for input and output map data, and the computer statistics packages, SPSS and BMD, were used to perform the multivariate statistical analysis. Fourteen variables were analyzed to investigate the characteristics of their fire quench distribution and to estimate the correlation coefficients among them. Principal component analysis was executed to find the dimensions of forest land characteristics, and factor scores were used for proper samples of OTU throughout the study area. In order to develop the classes of forest land classification based on 102 surrogates, cluster and discriminant analyses of principal descriptor variable matrix were undertaken. Results obtained through a series of multivariate statistical analyses were as follows ; 1) Principal component analysis was proved to be a useful tool for data selection and identification of principal descriptor variables which represented the characteristics of forest land and facilitated the selection of samples.