• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.235-247
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• 2022

A marine protected area (MPA) is a spatially designated section of the ocean where the biodiversity is high. Munseom MPA has a unique underwater landscape including soft coral, subtropical fish, and benthos, attracting many scuba divers. This paper intends to evaluate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the scuba diving management policy in the Munseom MPA. As a stated preference valuation method, a choice experiment was applied to assess divers' preferences with economic values for the policy. The attributes used in the study included zoning (temporal closure), conservation education, daily permit, soft coral area, and diving fee. We collected 333 questionnaires through online and field surveys and used 296 after excluding incomplete responses for the final data analysis. Study results show that a six-month closure, a decrease in soft coral habitat, and the diving fee were statistically significant. A positive coefficient with regard to the six-month closure variable indicates that divers preferred the policy, and the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) was estimated to be KRW 8,637 per person per dive. The aggregate WTP of KRW 233 million was obtained by multiplying the MWTP by the number of visiting divers per year. When comparing the levels of recreation specialization, more skilled divers preferred the management option. The results of this study will help predict the priority of management measures and the levels of acceptability among divers when diving management is implemented in Korea in the future. This study suggests that marine environmental policies need to consider divers as one of the important stakeholders for marine conservation.

• Korean Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.116-125
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• 2017

Alpine plants with a scarcity of pollinators in harsh environments have been believed to undergo selfing for reproductive assurance; however, contradictory evidence is also available. Snowmelt regimes in alpine areas function to change life history characteristics of alpine plants such as flowering time and duration; yet the effects of snowmelt regimes have never been tested in alpine plants in Korea. This study was conducted to investigate the dichogamy, mating systems, and flowering characteristics of Megaleranthis saniculifolia populations [early and late snowmelt plots (ESP and LSP, respectively)] in a subalpine area of Sobaeksan Mountain in Korea. M. saniculifolia exhibited incomplete protogyny in that despite early maturation of pistils, maturation times of pistils and stamens within flowers were partly overlapped. Control and hand-outcrossing treatments produced significantly higher number of follicles and seeds per flower than autonomous and hand-selfing treatments. Based on the aggregate fruit set, the auto-fertility index (AI) and self-compatibility index (SI) were 0.33 and 0.50, respectively. Snowmelt occurred 10 days earlier in ESP than in LSP, thereby ESP and LSP showed distinct differences with regard to flower longevity and season, but showing no difference in peak flowering dates. We concluded that M. saniculifolia is an incomplete protogynous and largely outcrossing plant requiring pollinator service. Temporal variation in snowmelt time and subsequent changes in flowering characteristics under climate change may further threaten the population persistence of M. saniculifolia which has already been designated as endangered species in Korea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.101-116
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• 1995

The fact that the demands on traffic data collection are imposed by economic and safety considerations raisese the question of the potential for complementing existing traffic data collection programs with satellite data. Evaluating and monitoring traffic characteristics is becoming increasingly important as worsening congestion, declining economic situations, and increasing environmental sensitivies are forcing the government and municipalities to make better use of existing roadway capacities. The present system of using automatic counters at selected points on highways works well from a temporal point of view (i.e., during a specific period of time at one location). However, the present system does not cover the spatial aspects of the entire road system (i.e., for every location during specific periods of time); the counters are employed only at points and only on selected highways. This lack of spatial coverage is due, in part, to the cost of the automatic counters systems (fixed procurement and maintenance costs) and of the personal required to deploy them. The current procedure is believed to work fairly well in the aggregate mode, at the macro level. However, at micro level, the numbers are more suspect. In addition, the statistics only work when assuming a certain homogenity among characteristics of highways in the same class, an assumption that is impossible to test whn little or no data is gathered on many of the highways for a given class. In this paper, a remote sensing system as complement of the existing system is considered and implemented. Since satellite imagery with high resolution is not available, digitized panchromatic imagery acquired from an aircraft platform is utilized for initial test of the feasibility and performance capability of remote sensing data. Different levels of imagery resolutions are evaluated in an attempt to determine what vehicle types could be classified and counted against a background of pavement types, which might be expected in panchromatic satellite imagery. The results of a systematic study with three different levels of resolutions (1m, 2m and 4m) show that the panchromat ic reflectances of vehicles and pavements would be distributed so similarly that it would be difficult to classify systematically and analytically remotely sensing vehicles on pavement within panchromatic range. Anaysis of the aerial photographs show that the shadows of the vehicles could be a cue for vehicle detection.