Abstract
Landforms are spaces for human life, habitats for animals and plants, and areas that provide various ecological services. However, human development has undermined landform where it should be kept as an important human asset. In South Korea, to reduce this damage, a system was created to evaluate the conservation value of landforms, and either designate them as conservation areas or obtain permission for their development in advance. However, the general public, who demands the development of landforms continuously, have frequently questioned the subjectivity of the evaluation criteria used for the conservation of landforms. National Institute of Ecology (NIE) in South Korea was carried out a project which was to increase the reliability of these criteria by modifying the conservation evaluation system into a quantitative system. This paper aims to introduce the geomorphological survey as a part of the Investigation of National Environment (INE), and an improved evaluation system via the Delphi, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), on-site verification, etc. As a result of this quantitative evaluation using detailed scoring indicators, specific criteria, and weights for evaluation, there is a low correlation between the indicators, and this confirmed that each indicator was evaluated correctly. In addition, as the quantitative evaluation results and the experts’ opinions generally coincided with the final evaluation grades and values, this indirectly confirmed that the experts who participated in the 4th INE agreed with the evaluation results. This research demonstrates a method that can be used to improve the objective assessment of landforms by experts’ opinion surveys. Future research could use the assessment system developed in this research and apply it to other surveys or countries.
Highlights
Assessments of geomorphological features are carried out to evaluate and mitigate the environmental effects of development or to designate areas with geomorphological and geological assets as conservation areas. One such evaluation is the environmental impact assessment (EIA), which has been adopted in many countries; the geomorphology in the EIA is concerned with natural disasters, in natural environments and landmark countries (Cavallin et al 1994)
National conserved areas are classified as protected areas (PA) and key biodiversity areas (KBAs) by IUCN, and natural world heritage sites (NWH), biosphere reserves (BR), and geoparks by UNESCO
This paper introduced an evaluation system and improvement process of the landform conservation evaluation performed as part of the topographic survey of South Korea’s natural environment survey
Summary
Assessments of geomorphological features are carried out to evaluate and mitigate the environmental effects of development or to designate areas with geomorphological and geological assets as conservation areas. The survey was conducted by setting up a survey section within an index dividing South Korea into a regular grid, and the geomorphological units were classified and evaluated by geomorphologists. The values of the geomorphological units were evaluated using the following eight indicators set by the MOE:. – Representativeness: highly assessed if the setting, processes, characteristics, and shapes of the geomorphological units are typically well represented. The pre-evaluations divided the value of the geomorphological unit into “high, medium, and low” according to the above method, and a rating according to the number of high and medium grades. If it got five or six high grades, the value became grade II
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