Proverbs can be regarded as pithy axioms of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which can be useful for sustainability education. By using an exploratory sequential mixed method, we analyzed TEK and ecoliteracy components embedded in rain-and tree-related Korean traditional proverbs, and further conducted a survey of university students to gauge their knowledge of the proverbs and draw correlations with their ecoliteracy. We classified 173 rain-and 117 tree-related traditional Korean proverbs and found that most of these were related to factual observations, such as ecological characteristics of tree species and the prediction of rainfall, which indicated people's understanding of ecological processes and patterns. We also found that students tended to provide correct answers for questions related to TEK-based worldviews, ethics and values, which are important components of ecoliteracy, thereby indicating the usefulness of proverbs in delivering TEK-based worldviews, ethics, and values. Overall, our study reasons that the learning of TEK-related traditional proverbs can be meaningful for enhancing ecoliteracy among urban youth, particularly when this learning is complemented with field-based observational learning within integrated approaches for sustainability education.

ABSTRACT. Our study discusses how literature, in particular an autobiographical novel, can be approached as a valuable reservoir of social-ecological memory (SEM). Through our analysis of acclaimed Korean writer Park Wan-suh's autobiographical novel Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, we discuss how an individual (the author) manifests ecoliteracy, place attachment, and identity in relation to Korea's traditional village landscape that can serve as a suitable setting for understanding Korea's local social-ecological contexts. We find a rich account of knowledge and practices related to living and ecological components, resource and landscape management systems, social institutions, and worldviews. The author's descriptions of her native village landscape show the role of village resource and landscape management practices in enhancing local biodiversity and developing ecoliteracy in relation to indigenous ecosystemlike concepts. In addition, several social capitals are mentioned as key to sustaining the village community. The author's knowledge of local plants is the result of her childhood experiences in nature, and her place attachment is tightly linked with her worldview that is cultivated through intricate human-nature relationships within the Korean traditional village landscape. Furthermore, the novel contributes to comprehending resilience thinking by providing a narrative of social changes and interactions between humans and nature. Thus, SEM retained in literature can facilitate a meaningful understanding of social-ecological contexts in a given socialecological system. Our study therefore suggests new functions of autobiographical memory in literary work for delivering SEM, and informs the study of SEM across the fields of humanities, social sciences, and natural resources management.

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Resilience is being widely adopted as a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding sustainability dynamics, despite the conceptual challenges in developing proxies and indicators for researchers and policy makers. In our study, we observed how the concept of resilience undergoes continued extension within the rural resilience literature. We comprehensively reviewed rural resilience literature using keyword co-occurrence network (KCN) analysis and a systematic review of shortlisted papers. We conducted the KCN analysis for 1186 papers to characterize the state of the rural resilience literature, and systematically reviewed 36 shortlisted papers to further examine how rural resilience analysis and its assessment tools are helping understand the complexity and interdependence of rural social-ecological systems, over three three-year periods from 2010 to 2018. The results show that the knowledge structure built by the high frequency of co-occurrence keywords remains similar over the three-year periods, including climate change, resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, and management, whereas the components of knowledge have greatly expanded, indicating an increased understanding of rural system dynamics. Through the systematic review, we found that developing resilience assessment tools is often designed as a process to strengthen adaptive capacity at the household or community level in response to global processes of climate change and economic globalization. Furthermore, community resilience is found to be an interesting knowledge component that has characterized rural resilience literature in the 2010s. Based on our study, we summarized conceptual characteristics of rural resilience and discussed the challenges and implications for researchers and policy makers.

In an effort to reconnect urban populations to the biosphere, which is an urgent task to ensure human sustainability, the concept of urban ecosystem services (UES) has recently garnered scholarly and political attention. With an aim to examine the emerging research trends and gaps in UES, we present an up-to-date, computer-based meta-analysis of UES from 2010 to 2019 by implementing a keyword co-occurrence network (KCN) approach. A total of 10,247 author keywords were selected and used to analyze undirected and weighted networks of these keywords. Specifically, power-law distribution fitting was performed to identify overall UES keyword trends, and clusters of keywords were examined to understand micro-level knowledge trends. The knowledge components and structures of UES literature exhibited scale-free network characteristics, which implies that the KCN of the UES throughout the 2010s was dominated by a small number of keywords such as “urbanization”, “land use and land cover”, “urban green space” and “green infrastructure”. Finally, our findings indicate that knowledge of stakeholder involvement and qualitative aspects of UES are not as refined as spatial UES approaches. The implications of these knowledge components and trends are discussed in the context of urban sustainability and policy planning.

The Korean traditional farm pond called dumbeong is an important rural landscape element that supports local biodiversity and is useful in irrigating agricultural fields during dry periods. This study assesses how plant communities in dumbeongs respond to adjacent land use, water depth, open-water surface, and nutrient levels and irrigation usage. Plant functional and species groups, based on trait and species data respectively from 20 dumbeongs in Seocheon-gun, South Korea, were classified by hierarchical analysis and non-metric multidimensional scaling. Relationships between the plant community composition and explanatory variables at both the species and functional group levels were tested through redundancy analysis. The results showed that irrigation usage prevented nutrient accumulation and water depth reduction of the ponds, and we found water depth was the only significant factor that determined plant composition at both species and functional group levels. The plant functional groups were more useful than plant species in predicting plant composition in dumbeongs, owing to their collective response to water depth and open-water surface. Our results demonstrate that management practices of dumbeong, such as periodic drainage, sediment removal and control of dominant plant species, alter its plant communities and thus need to be considered for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes.

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