대한민국 갯벌의 수호자, 생태지평연구소
구글 임팩트 챌린지: 갯벌키퍼스
<한눈에 보기>
- 프로젝트 : 갯벌키퍼스
- 한줄 요약 : 표준화된 갯벌 시민모니터링 체계 개발, 모니터링/기록 공유에 특화된 ‘갯벌 키퍼스’ 앱과 웹사이트 개발
- 숫자로 보는 임팩트 : 교육 중인 시민모니터링단 70여명, 갯벌키퍼스 조사기록 수 2000여건
- 키워드 : #한국의갯벌 #갯벌키퍼스 #생태지평연구소
- 관련 링크 : https://www.getbolkeepers.org/
장 처장은 어린 시절 학교에서 ‘인간은 많은 대한민국에서 갯벌은 간척하고 매립해야 할 쓸모없는 땅이다’라는 교육을 받았다. "그때만 해도 먹고 살기 어려웠기 때문에 생태계가 인간만을 위한 게 아니란 걸 몰랐죠."
경항신문 에 따르면 일제 강점기부터 시행된 대규모 간척사업은 오늘날까지 남한 지역에서만 서울 면적의 3배 정도 되는 갯벌이 사라지는 결과를 초래했다고 한다. 갯벌 사업의 환경적 피해는 1990년대 중반 시화호 물이 12.7km의 방조제로 인해 오염되며 처음으로 큰 화두가 됐다. 갯벌을 막아버린 방조제 때문에 갯벌은 정화 기능을 제대로 하지 못했고, 각종 생물은 떼죽음을 당했다. 장 처장은 “호수 물이 완전히 썩어가지고 인공위성 사진으로 보니 호수가 까맣게 보인 거예요. 사람들에게 큰 충격이 된 거죠.”라고 말한다.
호주에서 시베리아로 날아가는 철새들에게 한국의 갯벌들은 중요한 휴게소 역할을 한다. 갯벌이 간척되면 많은 새는 쉴 곳과 먹을 생물들을 잃게 되고, 이는 한반도 지역을 넘어 전 세계의 생태계에 영향을 끼친다.
장지영 처장은 생태지평연구소의 창립 멤버들 중 한 명이다. 2006년도에 설립된 연구소는 국내 환경운동의 베테랑들이 모여 주요 이슈들을 지속적으로, 깊게 파고드는 곳이다. 핵심적인 사업은 DMZ, 환경교육, 갯벌 등이다. 2016년 구글 임팩트 챌린지에 우승하며 연구소는 새로운 전환점을 맞이했다. 먼 훗날 돌이켜보면 대한민국 갯벌 보호 역사의 한 전환점이 될지도 모르겠다. 구글을 계기로 과거에 지속적으로 시도해 본 시민모니터링을 본격적으로 체계화하는 작업에 몰입했고, 이에 필요한 웹사이트 및 앱 ‘갯벌키퍼스’도 개발했다.
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| Ⓒ생태지평연구소 |
그래서 연구소는 2008년부터 5년간 지속적으로 시민모니터링을 통해 기름 유출 피해를 조사했다. 해마다 20여 명의 시민이 고가의 GPS 장비를 빌려 충청남도 북서쪽 해안가부터 전라남도 신안의 해안가까지 300km가 넘는 거리를 직접 걸어다녔다. 무인도에도 가고, 위험한 암반 지대도 걸어다니며 어느 지역에 기름이 얼마나 많이, 어떤 방식으로 남아 있는지 기록했다.
“그때는 공유할 수 있는 플랫폼이 없어서 그냥 완전 수기로 했어요. GPS 좌표 찍고, 사진으로 기름 사진 찍고, 기름 양을 자로 재고 종이에 기록하고… 조사가 끝난 후 자료도 공유하지 못했어요. 보고서는 썼지만요.” 이때의 조사는 연구소가 국제적으로 인증받은 가이드라인(캐나다 SCAT)을 통해 정량화된 시민모니터링을 집중적으로 한, 첫 시도였다. 하지만 시민모니터링 자체에 대한 시도는 새만금 갯벌 보호 운동을 통해서도 이미 해봤었다.
새만금을 지키지 못한 장지영 처장의 부채 의식은 어떻게 보면 생태지평연구소가 온라인 플랫폼 갯벌키퍼스를 구축하게 해준, 중요한 동력이 되었다. 1990년도 초반부터 진행되던 새만금 갯벌 간척 사업은 수년간에 걸친 환경 운동에도 불구하고 결국 그대로 진행되었고 마침내 세계에서 가장 긴 33.9km의 방조제가 2010년에 준공됐다.
“아무리 세계적으로 중요하다는 자연 생태계가 있어도 거기에 살고 있는 주민들이 동의하지 않으면 이 생태계는 보존할 수 없다는 점과 결국 무척 다양한 새들과 생물들이 있어도 그 운명을 결정하는 건 여전히 인간이라는 것을 느낀 거예요.”
이런 경험들을 영양분으로 삼아 연구소는 구글 지원금 5억 원을 활용해 갯벌키퍼스를 구축했다. 시민들을 모집해 그들이 거주하는 지역의 갯벌들에 대해 수집한 자료를 공유하고 과학적으로 데이터화하는 웹사이트 및 앱이다. 환경 보존의 주체에 외부에 있는 환경 운동가들 이외의 주민들도 포함하려는 중요한 시도다.
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| 2018년 여름 1차 교육 과정에 참여하는 시민모니터링단 지원자들 Ⓒ생태지평연구소 |
교육은 갯벌키퍼스 시민모니터링의 필수 불가결한 요소다. 물론 교육을 받지 않고도 일반 대중이 쉽게 참여할 수 있는 방법도 있다. 갯벌 생물들의 사진을 찍어 올리고 ‘여기 이 지역에 이 생물이 있어요’와 같은 식의 기록을 하는 것이다. 하지만 가장 난이도가 높은 ‘대형저서생물 서식지 매핑’을 예로 들어보자면, 사전 교육 없이는 조사하기 어려운 방법이다. 서식지 매핑의 목적은 어디에 어느 종이 얼마만큼 살고 있는지 파악하는 것이다.
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| 방형구를 사용해 서식지매핑을 하는 시민들. Ⓒ생태지평연구소 |
우선 시민모니터링단은 자 역할을 하는 방형구를 갯벌에 무작위로 얹는다. 그리고 방형구가 그려준 1m x 1m를 철저히 조사해야 한다. 갯벌 종류는 어떤 것인지(‘펄갯벌’, ‘모래갯벌’, ‘혼합갯벌’ 등), 갯벌 위에 보이는 구멍은 갯지렁이 것인지 게의 것인지 구멍의 종류와 수를 파악하고 갈쿠리로 갯벌을 파서 실제 관찰되는 종과 그 수를 갯벌키퍼스에 기록한다. 과학적인 평균값을 내기 위해 이 과정을 똑같은 장소에서 두 번 더 반복해야 한다.
시민모니터링단이 이렇게 지속적으로 서식지 매핑과 갯벌생물/바닷새 조사를 통해 자료를 측정하면 특정 갯벌에 이동하는 새가 무엇을 먹기 위해 방문하는지 생태학적 연계성을 파악할 수 있게 된다. 갯벌 생태계를 전반적으로 이해하게 되면 앞으로의 보존 방향도 구체적으로 그릴 수 있게 된다. 그리고 이 모든 과정은 체계적인 시민모니터링 교육을 전제로 한다.
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| Ⓒ생태지평연구소 |
생태지평연구소에 의하면 내년 2월 이후 교육을 마친 시민들만이 공식 시민모니터링단으로 활동할 수 있다고 한다. 현재 시민들이 갯벌키퍼스에 올린 조사 기록 수는 2,000여건이 넘지만, 아직 이 수치로 영향력을 판단하기에는 시기상조다. 시민들에 대한 교육 기간이 끝나지 않았고, 갯벌키퍼스의 뼈대가 되는 시민모니터링 방법에 대한 시스템도 마저 개발 중이기 때문이다.
앞으로의 계획은 시민모니터링단에게 가르칠 ‘퇴적 모니터링’ 방법을 개발하는 것이다. 그 외 일정한 숫자의 그들을 위한 비용 지급 시스템을 구축하고 시민모니터링단이 보호종을 법적 문제 없이 다룰 수 있도록 공식 조사증을 국가에서 발급받는 일도 해야 한다. 매우 어려운 과제 중 하나는 시민들의 조사 결과를 과학적 데이터로 분석하고 시각화하는 것이다.
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| 시민모니터링단의 1차 교육 과정 Ⓒ생태지평연구소 |
아직 갈 길은 멀다. 장 처장은 이렇게 말한다. “구글의 지원을 받아 개발은 했지만, 개발 후에 끝나버리면 안 되잖아요. 갯벌키퍼스가 계속되는 게 저희의 궁극적 목표입니다.” 그의 마음 속에는 아직도 새만금 갯벌이 매우 큰 비중을 차지하고 있다. 그는 또 이렇게 말한다. “이런 많은 과정을 통해 다시 새만금을 복원하는 것이 꿈입니다. 새들이 다시 돌아오는 생태계로 보존하는 것.”
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Eco-Horizon Institute: Protecting South Korea’s Tidelands
Google Impact Challenge: Getbol Keepers
<At a glance>
- Project : Getbol Keepers
- In a nutshell : Developed a standardized method of citizens monitoring South Korean tidelands, created an app/website for the monitoring and data sharing
- Impact in numbers : Around 70 citizens undergoing training as official Getbol Keepers monitors, around 2,000 tideland records posted on the app/website
- Keywords : #KoreaTidelands #GetbolKeepers #EcoHorizonInstitute
- Related link : https://www.getbolkeepers.org/
When I ask Ji Young Jang, a tideland conservation activist for over twenty years, why she likes tidelands, Jang bursts out laughing. Maybe the question felt like asking why someone likes the air. “It’s a very hard question,” says Jang. “To me, protecting tidelands feels almost like destiny. I had worked for a decade to protect Saemangeum, and failed. There must be some sort of debtor’s conscience in me.”
Jang grew up in a South Korea that taught its citizens about the seeming uselessness of tidelands: ‘In a country so small with so many, tidelands are there to be reclaimed.’ This was the message she heard as a child, throughout the 1970s and 80s. “Korea was poor still, and life was hard,” she explains. “People didn’t realize that our ecosystem didn’t exist just for humans.”
According to Kyunghyang, a daily newspaper, massive reclamation projects started under Japanese colonialism in the early 20th century. These projects intensified throughout the latter half of the century, eventually resulting in the disappearance of South Korean tidelands three times the size of Seoul. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the environmental damages of tideland reclamation surfaced to public awareness, when the Sihwa Lake was polluted to an unprecedented scale due to a 12.7km-long seawall. The seawall blocked the cleansing function of the adjacent tidelands, eventually destroying the lake and its organisms. “The water in the lake was completely rotten,” recalls Jang. “Satellite images showed the lake had become black. This was a huge shock to the Korean people.”
Reclaiming tidelands have repercussions for ecosystems not just within Korea, but globally. Among many other functions, tidelands in Korea act as important rest stops for birds flying from Australia to Siberia. When these rest stops are reclaimed or blocked, these birds often lose valuable places to recuperate and feed.
Jang is the principal researcher and one of the founding members of Eco-Horizon Institute. Established in 2006, the Institute focuses on in-depth and long-term research and campaigning of key environmental issues in South Korea, including the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, environmental education and tidelands.
When the Institute won the Google Impact Challenge (GIC) in 2016, this marked a turning point in the organization’s history, and hopefully, a turning point in the history of Korean tideland preservation. Thanks to Google, the Institute embarked on a massive mission to standardize and customize citizen monitoring, and to develop an app/website -- Getbol (‘tideland’) Keepers -- which would collect the monitors’ records of the tidelands into a scientifically reliable database.
Before getting into Getbol Keepers, let’s travel back to the previous decade in 2007. In early December at a northwestern port in South Korea, a crane barge owned by Samsung Heavy Industries collided with Hong Kong-registered crude carrier Hebei Spirit, spilling around 12,500kL of oil into the ocean. South Korean government officials called this accident the country’s worst oil spill ever. “When the spill first happened, every maritime research institute was on the case, studying the incident. But two or three years later, the number of researchers had declined drastically,” says Jang.
The Eco-Horizon Institute doggedly clung to the case, researching the damages of the spill for five years starting in 2008. The Institute accomplished the feat with the help of citizen monitors. Each year, around twenty citizens carried expensive rental GPS equipment and walked along the western coastline: around 300km from the northwestern shores of South Chungcheong Province all the way down to Sinan in South Jeolla Province. They visited uninhabited islands and trod on dangerous cliffs to record how much oil remained in specific areas.
“There was no online platform to share our data. So everyone recorded by hand on pieces of paper,” remembers Jang. “We dotted the GPS coordinates, took pictures of the oil, measured it with a ruler and wrote the numbers down on our papers…. We didn’t share that data with each other, although the Institute did write a report of the findings.”
The oil spill was the first time the Institute had focused on a standardized form of citizen monitoring, by following the globally accepted guidelines of Canada’s Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Team (SCAT). The Institute had attempted to do citizen monitoring before, albeit on a more rudimentary level, during the preservation efforts of the Saemangeum tidelands which lasted for well over a decade.
The Saemangeum seawall is the world’s longest at 33.9km. Saemangeum reclamation efforts had begun in the early 90s but wasn’t completed until 2010, due to the backlash from environmental groups. To the team at Eco-Horizon Institute, this failure to protect Saemangeum tidelands and related wildlife became a key fuel in eventually creating Getbol Keepers.
“We realized that no matter how globally important an ecosystem is, if the local people don’t agree to preserving it, that ecosystem cannot be protected,” Jang says, recalling the difficulty of seeing eye to eye with residents near Saemangeum. “It doesn’t matter how many birds and organisms live there; ultimately, humans determine the fate of their lives.”
These experiences enriched the Institute’s understanding of environmental activism and how to engage with local communities. Using their experiences as fodder, the team developed Getbol Keepers using the GIC grand prize of 500 million Korean won (around $450,000).
In a nutshell, the online platform is a website and app where trained citizen monitors can record and share the information they collect about the tidelands in their specific regions. This database will hopefully provide scientific insight into how to preserve tidelands; but at its base, Getbol Keepers is an attempt to involve local communities in preservation efforts.
The significance of Getbol Keepers shows when compared with the monitoring methods used by the Institute after the oil spill in 2007. Individual records -- the GPS points, photographs and other observatory notes -- can now get shared in a public, online space. Of course, the story of Getbol Keepers isn’t just about what happens online. In order for the data to have scientific value, each citizen monitor must undergo rigorous training, based on the monitoring methods the Institute has re-invented to fit South Korean ecosystems.
Regular, untrained citizens can participate on Getbol Keepers too, simply by taking a picture of what they see in the tidelands and posting. But a trained monitor is expected to record more intricately: For example, the most difficult type of recording is the habitat mapping of macrobenthos (invertebrates that live on or in sediment, or are attached to hard substrates).
A citizen monitor must first place a quadratic ruler onto a random plot of tideland. Then the monitor studies the 1m X 1m area captured by the ruler. For example, what is the type of tideland? How many holes are within the quadratic ruler? Are the small holes that of lugworms, crabs, etc? Then the monitor must dig out a small portion and examine the actual organisms living inside. All this is recorded on Getbol Keepers and repeated twice in the same place to obtain a scientific average.
Once these records are collected into a database, the information can be used to deduce larger insights about how the ecosystem is connected, e.g. what kind of bird eats which organisms, in what kind of tideland. And understanding the connectivity of the ecosystem means experts can better understand how to preserve the environment.
In 2018, the Institute assembled a team of around seventy trainee citizen monitors and hosted the first educational program at the height of summer. Most of the current trainees already have some background knowledge about tidelands. So far they have received detailed lectures from various experts, practiced recording out in the field, and made monitoring plans on a team basis. According to the Institute, only those who complete the education in February 2019 can be certified as official Getbol Keepers monitors.
Currently, there are around 2,000 recordings made public on Getbol Keepers. It’s still too early to quantify how influential the platform has been. Monitors are undergoing training and the Institute is still refining methods in the monitoring process. For the foreseeable future, the Institute has a lot of work left. The team plans to complete a model that citizen monitors can use to observe sedimentation; establish a proper compensation system for the monitors; apply for official state certificates that allow the monitors to observe and touch endangered species without legal hassles. After all this foundation is built, the Institute must also think of ways to visualize the database to make the information approachable to the wider public.
Getbol Keepers may just be getting off its feet, but different institutions are already paying attention. In November 2018, the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries announced that it will use Getbol Keepers as an example to refine its own models of citizen monitoring. The East Asian-Australian Flyway Partnership, which aims to protect migratory waterbirds, is also awaiting the database Getbol Keepers will provide in the future. If the platform gets translated into multiple languages, it can contribute valuable insight to the global preservation of migratory birds and tidelands.
“We received Google’s help and developed Getbol Keepers, but we don’t want the development to be it,” says Jang. “Our fundamental goal is to sustain and continue Getbol Keepers.” In her mind, the memory of Saemangeum tidelands still looms large. “All these steps we take -- maybe they will lead us back to Saemangeum. I dream about restoring the tidelands there, revitalizing it into an ecosystem where the birds can come back.”
작성자: 구글코리아 블로그 운영팀
Jang grew up in a South Korea that taught its citizens about the seeming uselessness of tidelands: ‘In a country so small with so many, tidelands are there to be reclaimed.’ This was the message she heard as a child, throughout the 1970s and 80s. “Korea was poor still, and life was hard,” she explains. “People didn’t realize that our ecosystem didn’t exist just for humans.”
According to Kyunghyang, a daily newspaper, massive reclamation projects started under Japanese colonialism in the early 20th century. These projects intensified throughout the latter half of the century, eventually resulting in the disappearance of South Korean tidelands three times the size of Seoul. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the environmental damages of tideland reclamation surfaced to public awareness, when the Sihwa Lake was polluted to an unprecedented scale due to a 12.7km-long seawall. The seawall blocked the cleansing function of the adjacent tidelands, eventually destroying the lake and its organisms. “The water in the lake was completely rotten,” recalls Jang. “Satellite images showed the lake had become black. This was a huge shock to the Korean people.”
Reclaiming tidelands have repercussions for ecosystems not just within Korea, but globally. Among many other functions, tidelands in Korea act as important rest stops for birds flying from Australia to Siberia. When these rest stops are reclaimed or blocked, these birds often lose valuable places to recuperate and feed.
Jang is the principal researcher and one of the founding members of Eco-Horizon Institute. Established in 2006, the Institute focuses on in-depth and long-term research and campaigning of key environmental issues in South Korea, including the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, environmental education and tidelands.
When the Institute won the Google Impact Challenge (GIC) in 2016, this marked a turning point in the organization’s history, and hopefully, a turning point in the history of Korean tideland preservation. Thanks to Google, the Institute embarked on a massive mission to standardize and customize citizen monitoring, and to develop an app/website -- Getbol (‘tideland’) Keepers -- which would collect the monitors’ records of the tidelands into a scientifically reliable database.
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| Getbol (‘tideland’) Keepers. ⒸEco-Horizon Institute |
The Eco-Horizon Institute doggedly clung to the case, researching the damages of the spill for five years starting in 2008. The Institute accomplished the feat with the help of citizen monitors. Each year, around twenty citizens carried expensive rental GPS equipment and walked along the western coastline: around 300km from the northwestern shores of South Chungcheong Province all the way down to Sinan in South Jeolla Province. They visited uninhabited islands and trod on dangerous cliffs to record how much oil remained in specific areas.
“There was no online platform to share our data. So everyone recorded by hand on pieces of paper,” remembers Jang. “We dotted the GPS coordinates, took pictures of the oil, measured it with a ruler and wrote the numbers down on our papers…. We didn’t share that data with each other, although the Institute did write a report of the findings.”
The oil spill was the first time the Institute had focused on a standardized form of citizen monitoring, by following the globally accepted guidelines of Canada’s Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Team (SCAT). The Institute had attempted to do citizen monitoring before, albeit on a more rudimentary level, during the preservation efforts of the Saemangeum tidelands which lasted for well over a decade.
The Saemangeum seawall is the world’s longest at 33.9km. Saemangeum reclamation efforts had begun in the early 90s but wasn’t completed until 2010, due to the backlash from environmental groups. To the team at Eco-Horizon Institute, this failure to protect Saemangeum tidelands and related wildlife became a key fuel in eventually creating Getbol Keepers.
“We realized that no matter how globally important an ecosystem is, if the local people don’t agree to preserving it, that ecosystem cannot be protected,” Jang says, recalling the difficulty of seeing eye to eye with residents near Saemangeum. “It doesn’t matter how many birds and organisms live there; ultimately, humans determine the fate of their lives.”
These experiences enriched the Institute’s understanding of environmental activism and how to engage with local communities. Using their experiences as fodder, the team developed Getbol Keepers using the GIC grand prize of 500 million Korean won (around $450,000).
In a nutshell, the online platform is a website and app where trained citizen monitors can record and share the information they collect about the tidelands in their specific regions. This database will hopefully provide scientific insight into how to preserve tidelands; but at its base, Getbol Keepers is an attempt to involve local communities in preservation efforts.
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| Trainee citizen monitors participating in the first education program in summer 2018. ⒸEco-Horizon Institute |
Regular, untrained citizens can participate on Getbol Keepers too, simply by taking a picture of what they see in the tidelands and posting. But a trained monitor is expected to record more intricately: For example, the most difficult type of recording is the habitat mapping of macrobenthos (invertebrates that live on or in sediment, or are attached to hard substrates).
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| Trainee monitors mapping tideland habitats using quadratic rulers. ⒸEco-Horizon Institute |
Once these records are collected into a database, the information can be used to deduce larger insights about how the ecosystem is connected, e.g. what kind of bird eats which organisms, in what kind of tideland. And understanding the connectivity of the ecosystem means experts can better understand how to preserve the environment.
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| ⒸEco-Horizon Institute |
Currently, there are around 2,000 recordings made public on Getbol Keepers. It’s still too early to quantify how influential the platform has been. Monitors are undergoing training and the Institute is still refining methods in the monitoring process. For the foreseeable future, the Institute has a lot of work left. The team plans to complete a model that citizen monitors can use to observe sedimentation; establish a proper compensation system for the monitors; apply for official state certificates that allow the monitors to observe and touch endangered species without legal hassles. After all this foundation is built, the Institute must also think of ways to visualize the database to make the information approachable to the wider public.
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| Citizen monitors during the first training program in 2018. ⒸEco-Horizon Institute |
“We received Google’s help and developed Getbol Keepers, but we don’t want the development to be it,” says Jang. “Our fundamental goal is to sustain and continue Getbol Keepers.” In her mind, the memory of Saemangeum tidelands still looms large. “All these steps we take -- maybe they will lead us back to Saemangeum. I dream about restoring the tidelands there, revitalizing it into an ecosystem where the birds can come back.”
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