Recently the use demand for national parks has been rapidly increased due to the change of leisure patterns in Korea. The intensive use of national parks, however, can cause serious management problems both in resource conservation and in visitor satisfaction. In order to prepare the effective management plan for the sustainable use of national parks, it is essential to evaluate the visitor satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to provide important information for the management strategies for Namsan and Tohamsan national parks in Kyongju. Importance-performance analysis (IPA) was adopted to analyze the visitor expectation and satisfaction. The questionnaire survey was performed to the 420 visitors of the three sites (Namsan Sam-reung, Namsam Yong-jang, and Tohamsan) that are the most popular areas in Kyongju national park. The IPA for the 18 satisfaction items shows that all the values for importance are higher than those for performance in the three sites. This results indicates that visitors' satisfactions for the 18 items are lower than their expectations. The IP matrix reveals that the management effort should be concentrated on the educational opportunities for nature and culture in Yong-jang, on the convenient access to park in Sam-reung. and on the availability of cool drinking water in Tohamsan. Based on the results, several suggestions for the management strategies were summarized for the three sites in conclusion.

Korea has made the rapid economical development under the condition with the high population density and low available land. In this context, conservation of land environment, connected directly with living quality of human, has mostly ignored. Prior Environment Review System(PERS) is the one to investigate the locational validity, environmental impacts, harmony with surrounding environment, from the early stage of administrative plan or development project. PERS was amended to include SEA(Strategic Environment Assessment) system on June 1, 2006. But, several problems, including the loss of administrative ability, cost, and time, have been appeared, since the system is applied to all administrative plans without any distinction and plans or projects are delayed generally. In this study, the weaknesses of PERS were indicated through the comprehensive analysis including literature survey, study of legal and internet database, and the recently published PERS reports. Based on that, the improvement schemes were suggested to be harmonized with the nature of SEA. This study was mainly focused on a PERS for the designation of conservational area of hot-spring wells, conducted by authors.

Attempts to develope designation criteria for ecological protected areas were made for rational and scientific designation and management of 'ecosystem and landscape conservation areas', 'wetland protection areas', 'special islands protection areas', and 'wildlife protected areas' which have been designated and managed by the Ministry of Environment. Through analysis of the requisites and criteria of IUCN, UNESCO, Natura 2000, the Ramsar convention, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany as well as various academic researches, evaluation items of the protected areas were classified into naturalness, biodiversity, ecosystem, and scientific values. These classification titles are reflection of Korean laws concerning the 4 protected areas described above. Of these items 'naturalness' is composed of 3 factors of wilderness, geomorphology and landscape, and vegetation. 'Biodiversity' is composed of the 5 factors of species diversity, endangered species, rare species, indigenous biological resources, and habitat of wetland wild animals. 'Ecosystem' is composed of 5 factors of typicalness, diversity, rarity, restoration ability, and degree of interference. All factors are scored using a 3 point scale of high, middle, or low and are then transformed into the numerical index for designating and zoning purposes. Conclusively, it is expected that the developed methodology will be highly applicable with field verifications.

As a transition zone between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, riparian areas of rivers and streams play significant roles in production and decomposition for river and stream systems. Understanding of the physical and ecological characteristics of riparian areas are, therefore, important for the management of river and stream systems. It is especially important to understand the characteristics of riparian areas for the Nakdong River in Korea which has a large watershed area and diverse land uses. This study aimed at collecting field data, according to stream types, which are essential for the management of riparian areas of the middle and lower reaches of the Nakdong River, Korea. Most riparian areas surveyed in this study had roads within 100 meters from river edges. Distances from water edge to banks were less than 1m for most riparian areas neighboring agricultural lands, indicating that those areas might be very vulnerable to pollutant inputs from non-point sources. Water quality data indicated that soil erosion in the riparian areas could be a major source of phosphorus input to the Nakdong River and land use patters might have a significant influence on nitrogen concentration in the river. Heavy metal concentrations in soils of the riparian areas of the river were below soil quality standards, except arsenic and chromium. Vegetation surveys showed that therophytes were the most frequently occurred riparian plants in the Nakdong River. Number of aquatic plant species increased downstream, with the most diverse aquatic plants observed in wetlands and irrigation canals of the West Nakdong River. Occurrence rate of naturalized plants and urbanization index were high in the survey sites adjacent to urban and agricultural areas.

According to IPCC fourth assessment report in 2007, global mean temperatures have risen by 0.74 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. Moreover, in the recent 25 years, global mean temperatures have risen by 0.45 degrees Celsius, which is 2.4-times larger than those in the past 100 years. The evidences for climate change, such as sea level rise, arctic glacier melt, and desertification in Asia, have occurred and increased over the globe. In Korea, because regional climate has been changed, types of agriculture and fishery should be replaced. And as precipitation pattern behave differently from the past decades, water management would be more difficult, furthermore, atmospheric environment, related to concentrations for ozone, sulfate, etc., could be worse. Nevertheless, we have only focused on greenhouse gas reduction duty for the Convention of Climate Change. Fortunately, in the fourth plan on climate change, we have planned to manage climate change more actively since 2007. In Korea, the emission of carbon dioxide has increased about 1.9-times more, from 311million ton in 1990 to 591million ton in 2004. And also about 2 ppm rise every year for concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As a result, ecosystem, quality of water and atmosphere would be affected. Here, the emission of greenhouse gases over the globe is examined, and the effect of greenhouse gases for climate change is reviewed from the results of previous studies. In addition, the countermeasures of mitigation and adaptation on climate change were discussed for the understanding.