Impact and recovery assessment of sand mining activities on benthic communities along Korean coasts

초록

Coastal zone has been recently recognized as important natural resources where the ecosystem services occur. For the aggregate supply and demand, sand mining has been conducted in coastal areas including exclusive economic zone (EEZ). However, due to the economic activities, it is expected that huge negative impacts on the coastal habitats take place. Hence, we need effective environmental policies or management action to cope with the sources and, in turn, this should be based on the objective understanding and accurate information on the impact of sand mining activities. We (1) established control and impacted sites within and out of mining areas in Gyeonggi Bay off the Incheon coast and EEZ off the Gunsan and Busan coasts; (2) compared and analyzed the monitoring data of macrobenthic communities; and (3) assessed possible changes in benthic ecosystem by application of biological indices / parameters and multivariate statistics. These approaches showed differences in community structure, composition and habitat quality in response to the mining activities. A recovery time, a key to damage assessment could be estimated awing to the apparent impact observed in benthic communities. It was different among the sites and ranged from several months to years which reflected the existence of different environmental / biological regimes. To provide a better conservation management plan, it was perceived that we need to set research priorities to understand the localized pattern in b benthic recovery.