Yongneup of Mt. Daeam — Korea's Only Alpine Peat Moor Ramsar Site (Republic of Korea)

Yongneup ("Dragon Marsh"), on the upper slopes of Mt. Daeam (1,280 m) in Inje County, Gangwon Province, is South Korea's only high-altitude peat-forming moor and, since 28 March 1997, the country's first wetland listed under the Ramsar Convention (Ramsar Site No. 898). Formed over roughly 4,000 years, the peat reaches 1.5 m in depth and accumulates at only 0.5–1 mm per year, making it one of the slowest-growing and most fragile freshwater peatlands in East Asia. It is jointly protected as a Natural Monument and Ramsar site under South Korea's Ministry of Environment, the Cultural Heritage Administration and the Korea Forest Service.
A 2025 peer-reviewed study (Diversity, MDPI) analysed 200 systematically placed 1×1 m quadrats across the moor and its transitional zone, recording 130 herbaceous taxa across nine distinct plant communities. Using CHAID decision-tree analysis, the researchers established quantitative environmental thresholds — for example, community composition shifts at 22.0 cm and 48.3 cm peat depth, at 8.93 mg/kg available phosphorus, and at 64.5% organic-matter content — that now give managers concrete, measurable triggers for detecting degradation and guiding restoration priorities.
This is protection-and-monitoring evidence rather than an active carbon-payment or large-scale rewetting scheme: no site-specific greenhouse-gas flux or sequestration-rate measurements were found, so the carbon-storage value implied by the slow peat-accumulation rate should be read as indicative, not verified. The site's small size (roughly 210 m by 275 m) also limits how much can be generalised from it, but the rigor of its long-term ecological monitoring is unusual among the world's high-altitude peatlands.

Read the full analysis: https://rsis.ramsar.org/ris/898