ISSN : 2287-8327
The importance of forests continues to increase throughout the world, and one of the reasons is that a forest is a major place to emit terpenes, which have been reported to be beneficial to human health. In South Korea, forests occupy about 64% of the total land area and consist mainly of pine and oak trees. Since only a limited number of forests have been analyzed to date, a comprehensive understanding of terpenes emitted from regional forests remains in its infancy in Korea. Here, to gain insights into terpenes from regional forests located in South Korea, we review the characteristics of Korean forests and recent studies on major terpenes emitted from regional forests as well as from native trees dominant in South Korea. We also discuss meteorological factors that affect the terpene emissions in Korean forests. In conclusion, 18 types of terpenes were detected in Korean forests and their compositions in different forests are largely dependent on the dominant plant species in the forest. Moreover, terpene emissions in Korean forests are affected by various environmental factors, including temperature, amount and duration of daylight, season, and age of trees. To improve the understanding of the characteristics of terpene distribution, more studies are required on the terpene production of Korean forests in various regions.
In recent decades, as it becomes increasingly important to monitor and research long-term ecological changes, worldwide attempts are being conducted to integrate and manage ecological data in a unified framework. Especially domestic ecological data in South Korea should be first standardized based on predefined common protocols for data integration, since they are often scattered over many different systems in various forms. Additionally, foreign ecological data should be converted into a proper unified format to be used along with domestic data for association studies. In this study, our interest is to integrate ECN data with Korean domestic ecological data under our unified framework. For this purpose, we employed our semi-automatic data conversion tool to standardize foreign data and utilized ground beetle (Carabidae) datasets collected from 12 different observatory sites of ECN. We believe that our attempt to convert domestic and foreign ecological data into a standardized format in a systematic way will be quite useful for data integration and association analysis in many ecological and environmental studies.
Background: Conventional bird observation methods are line survey or point count method by bare eyes or through binoculars or telescopes. But in this study, the possibility of monitoring waterbirds using drones beyond the conventional research methods was explored. It also describes the direction of producing and accumulating images of waterbird habitats as a method to efficiently determine changes in waterbird habitats. Results: From the study, it was concluded that waterbird monitoring using drones was a new monitoring technique which could be applied to the field and 26 kinds of waterbirds were observed. In the case of a drone with a single lens, it was difficult to identify objects because the size of the subject was too small at a certain altitude. In this case, zoom lens can be an alternative. It has also been verified that image analysis software can be used to accumulate images of waterbird habitats. Conclusions: If various kinds of advanced drones and cameras are used, it would be possible to monitor larger areas including the areas that are difficult for human access and to observe more waterbirds and wider habitats.