Landscape metrics to assess the ecological conditions of city regions: Application to Kwangju City, South Korea

Urbanisation can cause severe environmental problems and threaten biodiversity by habitat destruction, fragmentation and degradation. This is particularly the case in fast-growing South Korean city regions. While nature conservation policies were recently adopted that require the creation of habitat corridors, there is a lack of ecological information and tools for effective biodiversity conservation planning. This research has developed and customised an approach that combined landscape character assessment with four landscape ecological metrics to provide quantitative information on the ecological conditions for biodiversity conservation planning at the city regional level. The metrics used in this study were landscape heterogeneity, patch shape, patch distance and patch context. These indices were simple to use and required land cover data that were recorded from aerial photography and a digital topographic map. The metrics indicated the highest species richness, highest potential for species dispersal and highest ecological stability for the mountain landscape, followed by the urban fringe, agricultural land and the urban area. The results suggest that the landscape ecological metrics provide a useful tool that could play an important role in supporting spatial planning for biodiversity conservation.