EAPSI: Assessing Effects of Urban Proximity on Plant Communities in an Island Ecosystem

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Islands are fragile ecosystems and endemic species are particularly susceptible to extinction from environmental change and habitat exclusion from exotic species. Understanding human impacts on plant communities on island ecosystems is important because islands are often hotspots of biodiversity. This project seeks to determine the effects of urban proximity on plant species composition and diversity. The research will be conducted primarily on Ulleung Island, a small, isolated volcanic island in South Korea and will focus on understory vegetation. The research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Seung-Chul Kim of Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea. Dr. Kim studies genetic relationships among plant groups, and has extensive experience conducting phylogentic and population studies on Ulleung Island. Ulleung Island, Gyeongsanbukdo, South Korea, also known as Ulleungdo, is approximately 72.9 sq km in area and hosts 685 plant taxa, including 41 taxa of rare plants and 30 taxa of endemic plants. The high biodiversity of the island makes it an excellent candidate for ecological study. In particular, studying human proximity impacts on biodiversity on Ulleungdo can illuminate the influence of anthropogenic activity from the local population and tourists on ecologically diverse temperate island ecosystems. The project involves sampling understory vegetation in deciduous, mixed, and coniferous canopy forests of varying distances from urban influence. The collected data will serve as the baseline for future study of change over time due to direct human influence (e.g. habitat disruption and exotic species introduction) and indirect human influence (e.g. altered environmental factors due to climate change). In working with Doctor Seung-Chul Kim, this project will link vegetative community research with ongoing phylogenetic research to create a more complete picture of Ulleungdo's unique flora and ecology.This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports the summer research of a U.S. graduate student and is funded jointly by the National Science Foundation and the National Research Foundation of Korea.