• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.497-508
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• 2013

The objective of this study is to determine the spatiotemporal influences of climatic factors and atmospheric aerosol on phenological cycles of the Korea Peninsular on a regional scale. High temporal-resolution satellite data can overcome limitations of ground-based phenological studies with reasonable spatial resolution. Study results showed that phenological characteristics were similar among evergreen forest, deciduous forest, and grassland, while the inter-annual vegetation index amplitude of mixed forest was differentiated from the other forest types. Forest types with high VI amplitude reached their maximum VI values earlier, but this relationship was not observed within the same forest type. The phase of VI, or the peak time of greenness, was significantly influenced by air temperature. Aerosol optical thickness (AOT) time-series showed strong seasonal and inter-annual variations. Generally, aerosol concentrations were peaked during late spring and early summer. However, inter-annual AOT variations did not have significant relationships with those of VIs. Weak relationships between AOT amplitude and EVI amplitude only indicates that there would be potential impacts of aerosols on vegetation growth in the long run.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.73-83
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• 2016

Forest degradation reduces ecosystem services provided by forest and could lead to change in composition of species. In North Korea, there has been significant forest degradation due to conversion of forest into terrace fields for food production and cut-down of forest for fuel woods. This study analyzed the phenological changes in North Korea, in terms of vegetation and moisture in soil and vegetation, from March to Octorber 2013, using MODIS (MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) images and indexes including NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), NDSI (Normalized Difference Soil Index), and NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index). In addition, marginal farmland was derived using elevation data. Lastly, degraded terrace fields of 16 degree was analyzed using NDVI, NDSI, and NDWI indexes, and marginal farmland characteristics with slope variable. The accuracy value of land cover classification, which shows the difference between the observation and analyzed value, was 84.9% and Kappa value was 0.82. The highest accuracy value was from agricultural (paddy, field) and forest area. Terrace fields were easily identified using slope data form agricultural field. Use of NDVI, NDSI, and NDWI is more effective in distinguishing deforested terrace field from agricultural area. NDVI only shows vegetation difference whereas NDSI classifies soil moisture values and NDWI classifies abandoned agricultural fields based on moisture values. The method used in this study allowed more effective identification of deforested terrace fields, which visually illustrates forest degradation problem in North Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_3
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• pp.891-907
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• 2023

Compact Advanced Satellite 500-4 (CAS500-4) is scheduled to be launched to collect high spatial resolution data focusing on vegetation applications. To achieve this goal, accurate surface reflectance retrieval through atmospheric correction is crucial. Therefore, a machine learning-based atmospheric correction algorithm was developed to simulate atmospheric correction from a radiative transfer model using Sentinel-2 data that have similarspectral characteristics as CAS500-4. The algorithm was then evaluated mainly for forest areas. Utilizing the atmospheric correction parameters extracted from Sentinel-2 and GEOKOMPSAT-2A (GK-2A), the atmospheric correction algorithm was developed based on Random Forest and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM). Between the two machine learning techniques, LGBM performed better when considering both accuracy and efficiency. Except for one station, the results had a correlation coefficient of more than 0.91 and well-reflected temporal variations of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (i.e., vegetation phenology). GK-2A provides Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) and water vapor, which are essential parameters for atmospheric correction, but additional processing should be required in the future to mitigate the problem caused by their many missing values. This study provided the basis for the atmospheric correction of CAS500-4 by developing a machine learning-based atmospheric correction simulation algorithm.

• Spatial Information Research
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.91-102
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• 1995

The purposes of this paper are to find ways to detect ecotone between two eco'||'&'||'not;systems, measure the width and size of ecotone around the Mt. Pukhansan National Park, and investigate environmental impacts, if any, on the forest ecosystem of the park by human activities. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index(NDVI) derived from TM data and the ana'||'&'||'not;lytical capabilities of GIS are used to investigate characteristics of the ecotone, or the impact zone, of the park. Major findings of the study can be summarized as follows: First, it was found that ecotone of the park could be identified from NDVI -distance curves deri"ed by a series of buffering op'||'&'||'not;erations. Second, NDVIs of all three years of the national park are about 14 percent higher than surrounding areas. Third, width of ecotone were found to be closely related to phenology, adjacent land use, environmental degradation, etc. Third, ecotone of the study area was nearly douvled during 1985-1993 period, which might be caused by heavy trampling of visitors. Thus it can be concluded that further studies are needed to find exact causes of the deterioration of plant communities of the ecotone of the park.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 1999.11a
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• pp.439-442
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• 1999

It is important to analyze the seasonal change profiles of land cover type in large scale for establishing preservation strategy and environmental monitoring. Because the NOAA-AVHRR data sets provide global data with high temporal resolution, it is suitable for the land cover classification of the large area. The objectives of this study were to classify land cover of Korea, to investigate the phenological profiles of land cover. The NOAA-AVHRR data from Jan. 1998 to Dec. 1998 were received by Korea Ocean Research & Development Institute(KORDI) and were used for this study. The NDVI data were produced from this data. And monthly maximum value composite data were made for reducing cloud effect and temporal classification. And the data were classified using the method of supervised classification. To label the land cover classes, they were classified again using generalized vegetation map and Landsat-TM classified image. And the profiles of each class was analyzed according to each month. Results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, it was verified that the use of vegetation map and TM classified map was available to obtain the temporal class labeling with NOAA-AVHRR. Second, phenological characteristics of plant communities of Korea using NOAA-AVHRR was identified. Third, NDVI of North Korea is lower on Summer than that of South Korea. And finally, Forest cover is higher than another cover types. Broadleaf forest is highest on may. Outline of covertype profiles was investigated.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_1
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• pp.1301-1314
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• 2022

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is utilized as an indicator to represent the vegetation condition on the land surface in various applications such as land cover, crop yield, agricultural drought, soil moisture, and forest disaster. However, satellite optical sensors for visible and infrared rays cannot see through the clouds, so the NDVI of the cloud pixel is not a valid value for the land surface. This study proposed a real-time correction of the underestimation noise for GEO-KOMPSAT-2A (GK2A) daily NDVI and made sure its feasibility through the quantitative comparisons with Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NDVI and the qualitative interpretation of time-series changes. The underestimation noise was effectively corrected by the procedures such as the time-series correction considering vegetation phenology, the outlier removal using long-term climatology, and the gap filling using rigorous statistical methods. The correlation with MODIS NDVI was higher, and the difference was lower, showing a 32.7% improvement compared to the original NDVI product. The proposed method has an extensibility for use in other satellite products with some modification.

• Asian Journal of Atmospheric Environment
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.127-135
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• 2012

Urbanization has led to a reduction in green spaces and thus transformed the spatial pattern of urban land use. An increase in air temperature directly affects forest vegetation, phenology, and biodiversity in urban areas. In this paper, we analyze the changing land use patterns and urban heat distribution (UHD) in Seoul on the basis of a spatial assessment. It is necessary to monitor and assess the functions of green spaces in order to understand the changes in the green space. In addition, we estimated the influence of green space on urban temperature using Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) imagery and climatic data. Results of the assessment showed that UHD differences cause differences in temperature variation and the spatial extent of temperature reducing effects due to urban green space. The ratio of urban heat area to green space cooling area increases rapidly with increasing distance from a green space boundary. This shows that urban green space plays an important role for mitigating urban heating in central areas. This study demonstrated the importance of green space by characterizing the spatiotemporal variations in temperature associated with urban green spaces.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.553-563
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• 2006

This study aims to produce land-cover maps of Korean peninsula using multi-temporal MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) imagery. To solve the low spatial resolution of MODIS data and enhance classification accuracy, Linear Spectral Mixture Analysis (LSMA) was employed. LSMA allowed to determine the fraction of each surface type in a pixel and develop vegetation, soil and water fraction images. To eliminate clouds, MVC (Maximum Value Composite) was utilized for vegetation fraction and MinVC (Minimum Value Composite) for soil fraction image respectively. With these images, using ISODATA unsupervised classifier, southern part of Korean peninsula was classified to low and mid level land-cover classes. The results showed that vegetation and soil fraction images reflected phenological characteristics of Korean peninsula. Paddy fields and forest could be easily detected in spring and summer data of the entire peninsula and arable land in North Korea. Secondly, in low level land-cover classification, overall accuracy was 79.94% and Kappa value was 0.70. Classification accuracy of forest (88.12%) and paddy field (85.45%) was higher than that of barren land (60.71%) and grassland (57.14%). In midlevel classification, forest class was sub-divided into deciduous and conifers and field class was sub-divided into paddy and field classes. In mid level, overall accuracy was 82.02% and Kappa value was 0.6986. Classification accuracy of deciduous (86.96%) and paddy (85.38%) were higher than that of conifers (62.50%) and field (77.08%).

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.109 no.4
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• pp.361-370
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• 2020

Long-term observation of the life cycle of plants allows the identification of critical signals of the effects of climate change on plants. Indeed, plant phenology is the simplest approach to detect climate change. Observation of seasonal changes in plants using digital repeat imaging helps in overcoming the limitations of both traditional methods and satellite remote sensing. In this study, we demonstrate the utility of camera-based repeat digital imaging in this context. We observed the biological events of plants and quantified their phenophases in the northern temperate type deciduous broadleaf forest of Jeombong Mountain. This study aimed to identify trends in seasonal characteristics of Quercus mongolica (deciduous broadleaf forest) and Pinus densiflora (evergreen coniferous forest). The vegetation index, green chromatic coordinate (GCC), was calculated from the RGB channel image data. The magnitude of the GCC amplitude was smaller in the evergreen coniferous forest than in the deciduous forest. The slope of the GCC (increased in spring and decreased in autumn) was moderate in the evergreen coniferous forest compared with that in the deciduous forest. In the pine forest, the beginning of growth occurred earlier than that in the red oak forest, whereas the end of growth was later. Verification of the accuracy of the phenophases showed high accuracy with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 0.008 (region of interest [ROI]1) and 0.006 (ROI3). These results reflect the tendency of the GCC trajectory in a northern temperate type deciduous broadleaf forest. Based on the results, we propose that repeat imaging using digital cameras will be useful for the observation of phenophases.

• Atmosphere
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.159-169
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• 2007

A comparison of the three land cover data sets (United States Geological Survey: USGS, International Geosphere Biosphere Programme: IGBP, and University of Maryland: UMd), derived from 1992-1993 Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer(AVHRR) data sets, was performed over the Asian continent. Preprocesses such as the unification of map projection and land cover definition, were applied for the comparison of the three different land cover data sets. Overall, the agreement among the three land cover data sets was relatively high for the land covers which have a distinct phenology, such as urban, open shrubland, mixed forest, and bare ground (>45%). The ratios of triple agreement (TA), couple agreement (CA) and total disagreement (TD) among the three land cover data sets are 30.99%, 57.89% and 8.91%, respectively. The agreement ratio between USGS and IGBP is much greater (about 80%) than that (about 32%) between USGS and UMd (or IGBP and UMd). The main reasons for the relatively low agreement among the three land cover data sets are differences in 1) the number of land cover categories, 2) the basic input data sets used for the classification, 3) classification (or clustering) methodologies, and 4) level of preprocessing. The number of categories for the USGS, IGBP and UMd are 24, 17 and 14, respectively. USGS and IGBP used only the 12 monthly normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), whereas UMd used the 12 monthly NDVI and other 29 auxiliary data derived from AVHRR 5 channels. USGS and IGBP used unsupervised clustering method, whereas UMd used the supervised technique, decision tree using the ground truth data derived from the high resolution Landsat data. The insufficient preprocessing in USGS and IGBP compared to the UMd resulted in the spatial discontinuity and misclassification.