Landscape Ecological Approaches to the Environmental Impact Assessment

환경영향평가기법의 경관생태학적 접근방안

Natural disturbance and environmental pressure on natural ecosystems are gradually increasing, and the cause is significantly related to large-scale environmental pollution, global warming, decreasing biodiversity and habitat fragmentation. Environmental impact assessment(EIA) in Korea has been focused on distribution and composition of fauna and flora as major evaluation aspects in ecosystem assessment. It is well known that those characteristics of flora and fauna strongly depend on characteristics and quality of habitat and ecosystem. However, there is no items to assess habitat and ecosystems of spatial ecological system in EIA. Many countries are trying to develop the EIA items to consider the spatial characteristics of habitat and ecosystem and those ecological dynamics as well as species level. In this stream, landscape ecology is emerging discipline to examine spatial pattern and ecological process within/between habitats and ecosystems. Landscape ecological analysis, as a special tool for ecosystem evaluation, has been appropriately adopted to the EIA system in the advanced countries. This review paper tries to introducing the possibilities of landscape ecological concept into the Korean EIA system.