• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.41 no.1 s.112
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• pp.106-120
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• 2006

Natural or man-made disaster has been expected to be one of the potential themes that can integrate human geography and physical geography. Typhoons like Rusa and Maemi caused great loss to insurance companies as well as public sectors. We have implemented a natural disaster management system for a private insurance company to produce better estimation of hazards from high wind as well as calculate vulnerability of damage. Climatic gauge sites and addresses of contract's objects were geo-coded and the pressure values along all the typhoon tracks were vectorized into line objects. National GIS topog raphic maps with scale of 1: 5,000 were updated into base maps and digital elevation model with 30 meter space and land cover maps were used for reflecting roughness of land to wind velocity. All the data are converted to grid coverage with $1km{\times}1km$. Vulnerability curve of Munich Re was ad opted, and preprocessor and postprocessor of wind velocity model was implemented. Overlapping the location of contracts on the grid value coverage can show the relative risk, with given scenario. The wind velocities calculated by the model were compared with observed value (average $R^2=0.68$). The calibration of wind speed models was done by dropping two climatic gauge data, which enhanced $R^2$ values. The comparison of calculated loss with actual historical loss of the insurance company showed both underestimation and overestimation. This system enables the company to have quantitative data for optimizing the re-insurance ratio, to have a plan to allocate enterprise resources and to upgrade the international creditability of the company. A flood model, storm surge model and flash flood model are being added, at last, combined disaster vulnerability will be calculated for a total disaster management system.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.5-15
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• 2020

The liquefaction phenomenon that occurred during the Pohang earthquake (M_L=5.4) brought new awareness to the people about the risk of liquefaction caused by the earthquake. Liquefaction hazard maps with 2 km grid made in 2014 used more than 100,000 borehole data for the whole country, and regions without soil investigation data were produced using interpolation. In the mapping of macro liquefaction hazard for the whole country, the site amplification effect and the ground water level 0 m were considered. Recently, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security (2018) published a new site classification method and amplification coefficient of the common standard for seismic design. Therefore, it is necessary to rewrite the liquefaction hazard map reflecting the revised amplification coefficient. In this study, the results of site classification according to the average shear wave velocity in soils before and after revision were compared in the whole country. Also, liquefaction assessment results were compared in Gangseo-gu, Busan. At this time, two ground accelerations corresponding to the 500 and 1,000 years of return period and two ground water table, 5 m for the average condition and 0 m the extreme condition were applied. In the drawing of liquefaction hazard map, a 500 m grid was applied to secure a resolution higher than the previous 2 km grid. As a result, the ground conditions that were classified as S_C and S_D grounds based on the existing site classification standard were reclassified as S₂, S₃, and S₄ through the revised site classification standard. Also, the result of the Liquefaction assessments with a return period of 500 years and 1,000 years resulted in a relatively overestimation of the LPI applied with the ground amplification factor before revision. And the results of this study have a great influence on the liquefaction assessment, which is the basis of the creation of the regional liquefaction hazard map using the amplification factor.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.107 no.4
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• pp.361-377
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• 2018

The aim of this study was to examine whether the guideline by the Ministry of Environment (ME) successfully and appropriately applied the IUCN Red List criteria at regional level and the rare and endangered national list considered eligible. A certain number of vascular plants, which are widely distributed in the world or in east Asia, deemed to be ineligible for assessment at a regional level as Not Applicable category (NA), because it occurs at very low numbers in South Korea. Among 377 vascular plant taxa evaluated by the ME, NA included 238 species, which represented 63.1%. The number of synonymized species or illegitimate name species were 13 species, which accounted for 3.4%. 21 species (9.3%) were threatened at global level and 103 species were possibly candidates species list for Red List assessments at regional level in the near future. The proportion of NA or waiting list was 66.6% among the list assessed by the ME. The most common errors involved incorrectly application of species extinction in case of population extinction in South Korea to the assessment and provided incorrect interpretation of the Red List criteria at regional level. The most assessments proposed by ME were not backed up without quantitative data quality, justifications, and sources. It is suggested that the risk of extinction should be reassessed at least in the Korean peninsula within the light of their overall distribution including far eastern Russia and North eastern China in north and for Japan and Taiwan in south for regional assessment. The results obtained here using the IUCN criteria at regional level showed that the list proposed by the ME produced an overestimation of the number of threatened vascular plants. Also, the misapplication of the term 'species extinction' for regional assessment was open to some degree of subjectivity and misinterpretation.