A measure for the promotion of mountain ecological villages in South Korea: focus on the national mountain ecological village investigation of 2014.

Background: Although South Korean mountain villages occupy 44 and 55 % of land and forest areas, respectively, these villages account for only 3 % of the national population and they suffer from a declining workforce owing to aging, wage inflation, and low forestry productivity. As a result, the South Korean government implemented a mountain ecological village development project from 1995 to 2013 in 312 of the 4972 mountain villages and investigated project performance in 2014. The present study establishes a measure for the promotion of mountain ecological villages by comparing the situation before and after the project.

Identification of suitable sites for mountain ginseng cultivation using GIS and geo-temperature.

This study was conducted to explore an accurate site identification technique using a geographic information system (GIS) and geo-temperature (gT) for locating suitable sites for growing cultivated mountain ginseng (CMG; Panax ginseng), which is highly sensitive to the environmental conditions in which it grows. The study site was Jinan-gun, South Korea. The spatial resolution for geographic data was set at 10 m × 10 m, and the temperatures for various climatic factors influencing CMG growth were calculated by averaging the 3-year temperatures obtained from the automatic weather stations of the Korea Meteorological Administration.

Geographic information system-based identification of suitable cultivation sites for wood-cultivated ginseng.

Wood-cultivated ginseng, including roots in its dried form, is produced in forest land without using artificial facilities such as light barriers. To identify suitable sites for the propagation of wood-cultivated ginseng, factor combination technique (FCT) and linear combination technique (LCT) were used with geographic information system and the results were superimposed onto an actual wood-cultivated ginseng plantation. The LCT more extensively searched for suitable sites of cultivation than that by the FCT; further, the LCT probed wide areas considering the predominance of precipitous mountains in Korea.