Forest Fragmentation Due to Roads in Chirisan National Park

Chirisan National Park, the first and largest one out of 20 national parks in Korea, is divided into five zones. They are composed of nature preservation zone, natural environment zone, natural residential zone, concentrated residential zone, and collective facility zone. However, the park is not a continuous habitat: roads, trails, local residences, and various facilities created the habitat mosaics severely fragmented. We investigated the fragmentation pattern of the park due to roads and mountain trails using GIS. Based on perimeter length, area, and the ratio of perimeter to area of each patch, we obtained landscape analysis indices which reflect the regularity of the patch shape. The 1 m-wide hiking trails divided the park into 491 fragments. The legal trails with 1.5 m - 3 m width which have been heavily used by hikers generate 58 fragments. Even the nature preservation zone, corresponding to a core zone comprising 31.8% of the park area, was divided into 37 fragments because of the roads and mountain trails. With the different widths of buffer applied, the core sizes of the fragments were reduced. When the 60 m buffer was applied, the patch interior areas ranged from 0.0001 to 47.77 $km^2$ with a mean of 7.08 $km^2$. The landscape shape indices were far greater than 1 for most of the cases with a maximum value of 25. These results clearly indicate that Chirisan National Park is not a continuous habitat, but mosaics of small, irregularly shaped habitat fragments. It is necessary to take the size and shape of the fragmented habitats into consideration when nature conservation is planned, especially for large wildlife such as brown bears.

지리산 국립공원 내 도로에 의한 산림조각화