Abstract
This study aims to understand the relationship between visitors and the degradation of natural resources in Bukhansan national park. We analyzed the trend of the number of visitors, destruction of natural resources and decrease of biodiversity per year. We further compared three types of trails, heavily-used trails and rarely-used trails and a trail with limited access, regarding the degree of destruction in the National Park through a field survey. Our result showed that increasing number of visitors had direct and indirect impact on the destruction of natural resources in the National Park. The direct impact came from visitors' excessive use of trails. Naturally, increasing number of visitors caused an immoderate use of natural resources. Physical degradation such as exposure of tree root, poor drainage of trails, trail erosion was more severe than other types of trails. Decreasing biodiversity or mild disturbance around trails is the indirect impact such as broken bough, worn-bark in rarely-used trails. Destruction scale greatly increased as the number of visitors increased. Real-named reservation system helped to prevent trails from degradation. Our result calls for the need of controlling the number of visitors to Bukhansan National Park to mitigate the degradation. We recommend dispersing visitors from the heavily-used trails to other trails and implementing real-named reservation system in the rarely-used trails for the effective management of the national park.
