A GIS-Assisted Assessment and Attribute-Based Clustering of Forest Wetland Utility in South Korea

Hee Jeong Yun, Dong Jin Kang, Dong-Kap Kim and Youngeun Kang
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Hee Jeong Yun: Department of Tourism Administration, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon 24341, Korea
Dong Jin Kang: Department of Landscape Architecture and Rural Systems Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Korea
Dong-Kap Kim: Korea National Arboretum, Pocheon 11186, Korea
Youngeun Kang: Research Department, Site Planning Co., Ltd., Busan 48733, Korea

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 17, 1-17

Abstract: The aim of this study was to determine the characteristics of forest wetlands by developing factors for site suitability and applying these factors to 107 sites in South Korea. We developed a forest wetland assessment in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) environment to assess site suitability. We considered 16 factors including slope, elevation, visibility, land ownership, distance to city, and so on. We conducted an expert survey with experts to analyze the relative importance by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). We found that the order of importance of the 5 criteria applied in this study was: (1) Natural Ecology, (2) Land Use, (3) Natural Landscape, (4) Tourist Attraction, and (5) Accessibility. We then analyzed the spatial characteristics of each site based on the AHP result and divided the 107 forest wetlands into three categories by cluster analysis. Sites with high scores on the assessment were primarily the landscape ecology or land use criterion. Our differentiation of these forest wetland characteristics could help enable policymakers to develop sustainable management with the aim of balancing conservation with utilization in ecotourism destinations.

Keywords: AHP; cluster analysis; efficient land use; environmental capacity; forest recreation; GIS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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