• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.319-328
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• 2014

Dorang - the Korean term for headwater streams - occupy a large portion of the total stream length in a basin, and contribute significantly towards the quantitative and qualitative characteristics, and the ecosystem, of the main river. The Ministry of Environment of South Korea has supported the investigation of the status of Dorang in the nation's four major basins, since 2007. Without a widely accepted academic or legal definition of Dorang, however, there are limits to understand the distribution of Dorang at the national scale and to systematically compile a Dorang database. This paper, through a review of the stream classification system and Korean legal system delineating streams, defines Dorang as 1st and 2nd order streams according to the Strahler ordering method, in a 1:25,000 geographical scale. Analysis of the Geum River basin, with this definition, reveals that the total length of Dorang is 20,622.4 km (73.6% of total stream length), and the number of Dorang catchments is 23,639 (71.3% of the basin area). Further analysis of the geomorphological characteristics of Dorang catchments shows that the average total stream length is 1.1 km, average catchment length is 1.2 km, average drainage area is $0.4km^2$, and average drainage density is 3.08/km.