An Assessment of Forest Cover Trends in South and North Korea, From 1980 to 2010

Abstract

It is generally believed that forest cover in North Korea has undergone a substantial decrease since 1980, while in South Korea, forest cover has remained relatively static during that same period of time. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Forest Resources Assessments--based on the reported forest inventories from North and South Korea--suggest a major forest cover decrease in North Korea, but only a slight decrease in South Korea during the last 30 years. In this study, we seek to check and validate those assessments by comparing them to independently derived forest cover maps compiled for three time intervals between 1990 and 2010, as well as to provide a spatially explicit view of forest cover change in the Korean Peninsula since the 1990s. We extracted tree cover data for the Korean Peninsula from existing global datasets derived from satellite imagery. Our estimates, while qualitatively supporting the FAO results, show that North Korea has lost a large number of densely forested areas, and thus in this sense has suffered heavier forest loss than the FAO assessment suggests. Given the limited time interval studied in our assessment, the overall forest loss from North Korea during the whole span of time since 1980 may have been even heavier than in our estimate. For South Korea, our results indicate that the forest cover has remained relatively stable at the national level, but that important variability in forest cover evolution exists at the regional level: While the northern and western provinces show an overall decrease in forested areas, large areas in the southeastern part of the country have increased their forest cover.

Is the Baekdudaegan “the Southern Appalachians of the East”? A comparison between these mountain systems, focusing on their role as glacial refugia

“…The setting up of the BDDG Mountains Reserve (BMR) in 2005 integrated these areas, in addition to adding 360 km 2 of newly protected land. However, conservation problems still persist, which include: (i) a clearly insufficient protection of the DPRK section of the BDDG by the DPRK network of PAs; the ROK part of the BDDG, although better covered, has still some gaps (e.g., in some sections the BMR is just a few hundreds of meters wide); (ii) management flaws, that in ROK that are related to weak engagement with local communities and lack of coordination of biodiversity and cultural resources (Heo et al, 2010); in DPRK, management problems are much larger and likely most PAs are just "paper parks" (McKinnon and Xie, 2008); (iii) deforestation, which is still occurring-despite limited-in the ROK part; in DPRK, although official reliable data are not available, deforestation would have occurred probably at a large-scale based on satellite imagery (Engler et al, 2014;Kang and Choi, 2014); (iv) lack of scientific knowledge in the DPRK section of the mountains; and (v) lack of cooperation between DPRK and ROK. In addition, the recent touristic development of the BDDG represents a growing problem in its ROK section and, for example, some degradation has been reported at the "BDDG hiking trail" (e.g., Kwon and Lee, 2003;Kwon et al, 2004;Cho and Chun, 2015).…”

Estimation of soil erosion rate in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea using the RUSLE model

“…The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (hereafter North Korea) is a country that suffers heavily from land degradation due to increasing anthropogenic pressures. These mainly include uncontrolled land conversion and unplanned logging, especially on sloping lands (Stone 2012;Engler et al 2014). In North Korea, continuous efforts have been made to increase arable land area.…”

“…As of 2004, c. 1670 km 2 of sloping lands have been reclaimed by the terrace field cultivation movement (Ahn 2005). Since the country's economic collapse in the early 1990s, and the resulting severe energy shortage, uncontrolled tree cutting for fuelwood by local people has further accelerated deforestation in rural areas (Engler et al 2014).…”

Impact of Deforestation on Agro-Environmental Variables in Cropland, North Korea

“…Furthermore, with such variables, it is possible to identify the changes in the quality of agriculture directly and indirectly by selecting wind erosion, water erosion, runoff, and organic carbon loss as the agro-environmental variables having an impact on cropland stability and productivity [5,13,28]. Soil erosion by wind and water is highly related to cropland stability, and runoff and organic carbon loss are strongly associated with cropland productivity in regard to the retention of soil organic matter.…”

“…To date, deforestation research in North Korea has focused on forest-related changes, i.e., on decreasing forests [3,5,6]. The phenomenon has become a contentious issue due to the noticeable decrease in forest areas.…”