In the previous post, we have observed the map by the United States Department of Agriculture of how wild bird pepper Capsicum glabriusculum has maintained its native presence throughout the southwest and the Appalachian Mountains along the East Coast of North America’s United States as far north as the state of New York.
What we must note is that the same range of mountains once served as an Ice Age refugium for many plant and animal species. We can see how the Appalachian Refugium could give sanctuary for the spread of bird pepper plants among other flora and fauna.
The Appalachians have a striking parallel during the Last Glacial Maximum with another mountain range also running along the Pacific Ocean on the eastern coast of the Asia continent. This parallel situation lies in the region of Korea.
The Korean Peninsula has the Baekdudaegan Mountain Range which runs from Baekdusan Mountain Peak in the north to Jirisan Mountain in the south.
The flora and fauna of the Korean Peninsula from Jirisan in the south all the way to areas surrounding the mountain Baekdusan to the north are deeply rooted in the Baekdudaegan Mountain Range.
At 1,600 km (1,000 miles), it is one of the the longest continuous mountain ranges in East Asia.
Although the Korean Peninsula is now surrounded on three sides by oceans, during the last Ice Age, the drastically lowered ocean levels exposed the West (Yellow) Sea seafloor as a vast plain and the East Sea was a semi frozen body of water surrounded by land bridges forming the coastline volcanic land mass that became Japan.
Korea was a mountain range during that time, the West Sea was a flat plain, the East Sea a semi-frozen lake.
- Map: Korea about 20,000 years ago. The area in red represents land exposed by lower sea levels due to glaciations. The green, blue, and yellow areas show areas hospitable to the humans during this era. The Sea of Corea (the East Sea) was an inland lake and Korea was land-connected to Japan, Formosa, Indochina, and India. Courtesy: The Times Atlas of World History (Times Books (4th ed) 1993).
During the Ice Age, the Baekdudaegan range served as a refugium for diverse plant and animal species sheltered from the extreme frigid conditions. At the peak of the Last Glacial Maxium, some ice sheets formed in regions north of Baekdusan, but the Korean Peninsula never experienced glaciation blotting out life.
The warmer southern end of the Korean Peninsula follows the pattern of higher unique biodiversity as revealed by prehistoric pollen analyses as well as study of current living species of plants and animals.
The Baekdudaegan Refugium is now getting recognition as a significant area of study similar to the Appalachian Mountains in the East Coast of the United States near the huge ice sheets that had scraped out the basins that formed the Great Lakes.
As the Ice Age faded and sea levels rose, shifting climates brought on by monsoonal weather patterns and four distinct seasons shifted the vegetation of the peninsula soon surrounded by oceans outwards.
What is most interesting, more than 2,000 years ago, ancient Koreans had a growing impact on transforming the landscape of the peninsula. Such were signs of the advancements of early ancient Korean civilization.
Agricultural practices had an impact. But it seems other cultural activities brought about replanted secondary forests of Korean red pine especially to surround settlements.
Fuel for heating ondol floors, cooking, bronze bell casting, iron works, pottery making and fine ceramics fired in kilns required ancient forest management to replace otherwise depleted forests. Moreover, building houses, temples, palaces, ship building, and a deep love for the red pine tree as a cultural symbol ensured the red pine had a special place to live alongside the Korean people.
The holy peak of Baekdusan and the Korean Peninsula shaped our Korean ancestors and they in turn shaped and preserved the land itself to reflect Korean culture.
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Highlights:
• Based on genetic studies and palaeoecological surveys, the main Korean mountain range, the so-called “Baekdudaegan” (BDDG), has been recently suggested to be a major glacial refugium at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) for the boreal and temperate flora of northeastern Asia
• Except for high-elevation mountains in DPRK (e.g., Mt. Baekdu) of 2,200–2,800 m above sea level (a.s.l.), high-elevation mountains in Honshu and Hokkaido in the Japanese Archipelago (although the glaciated areas in Japan are still debated), and part of some mountain ranges in Russian Far East (such as the Stanovoy and Bureinsky ranges), the whole areas shown in Fig. 1 were never glaciated.
• Within the Korean Peninsula, it is regarded as a sort of “backbone,” not only because it stretches across the whole peninsula with over 1,600 km (it is one of the longest chains of East Asia) but also because it is deeply embedded within the Koreans’ spirituality.
• Such value as a biodiversity reservoir seems to be directly related to the role of the BDDG as a Pleistocene refugium, as shown by recent phylogeographic and palaeoecological studies.
• [1] Korean populations showed higher intrapopulation genetic diversity than populations located further north (and, in some cases, with latitudinal decreases of genetic variation; i.e., consistent with the “southern richness” vs. “northern purity” paradigm of Quaternary biogeography;
• [2] Korean populations harbored ancestral haplotypes; and
• [3] Korean populations exhibited significant amounts of unique haplotypes/alleles.
• From the late Holocene (ca. 2000 cal yr BP), pine trees and agricultural indicators increased over South Korea, reflecting the intensity of human impact since that time (Fig. 6).
• Beginning about 2000 cal yr BP, the forest was affected by human impacts, such as cultivation, slash-and-burn agriculture, and deforestation, recorded in the pollen by the first appearance of the agricultural indicator buckwheat (Fagopyrum) in association with sudden increases in synanthropogenic indicators [Ambrosia, Plantago, Artemisia, and Gramineae (≥35 μm)] and secondary pine trees.
• The secondary pine forests are well developed around the villages… In rural Korea, pine forests are still used intensively for several traditional purposes.
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http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud= … 35&mod=skb
Is the Baekdudaegan “the Southern Applachians of the East”?
Mi Yoon Chung, Jordi López-Pujol1, Myong Gi Chung
Korean Journal of Plant Taxonomy
November 24, 2016
https://www.e-kjpt.org/m/journal/view.php?number=4826
Abstract
Based on genetic studies and palaeoecological surveys, the main Korean mountain range, the so-called “Baekdudaegan” (BDDG), has been recently suggested to be a major glacial refugium at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) for the boreal and temperate flora of northeastern Asia.On the basis of its shared role as a glacial refugium, and on a series of striking similarities in floristic richness and orographic features, the BDDG would constitute a sort of “eastern counterpart” of the Southern Appalachians.
Given its floristic, biogeographic, and cultural value, the BDDG merits high priority for conservation.
Fig. 1.
• The Baekdudaegan mountain system (where the main ridgeline is represented by a thick solid line) and its vicinity (including northeastern China, Russian Far East, and the Japanese Archipelago). Except for high-elevation mountains in DPRK (e.g., Mt. Baekdu known in China as Mt. Changbai) of 2,200–2,800 m above sea level (a.s.l.), high-elevation mountains in Honshu and Hokkaido in the Japanese Archipelago (although the glaciated areas in Japan are still debated) (Sawagaki and Aoki, 2011), and part of some mountain ranges in Russian Far East (such as the Stanovoy and Bureinsky ranges), the whole areas shown in Fig. 1 were never glaciated. Note that glaciers during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) are represented by dotted areas enclosed by dashed lines, and are drawn according to Zhou et al. (2011) for northeastern China, Kong and Watts (1993) for Korea, Ono et al. (2005) for Japan, and Velichko and Spasskaya (2002) for Russian Far East. The reconstructed LGM coastlines are represented by a thin dashed line.
Fig. 2.
• The Southern Appalachians and its vicinity (its main ridge is approximately represented by a thick solid line). It should be noted that the Southern Appalachians have multiple ridgelines (in contrast to the single ridgeline that characterizes the Baekdudaegan [BDDG]) and also includes various intermontane valleys. The Appalachians sensu lato are much longer (ranging from central Alabama to Newfoundland in Canada, with about 2,400 km). The definition followed by us for the “Southern Appalachians” can be approximately equated to the sum of “Southern” and “Central Appalachians” according to the Geological Society of America (Hatcher et al., 2007), and it is also highly coincident with the Appalachian Mountain Bird Conservation Region (AMBCRP, 2005). The “Northern Appalachians” are represented by a thick dashed line. The dotted area enclosed by a dashed line represents the extent of continental ice sheet at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) (French and Millar, 2014). The reconstructed LGM coastlines are represented by a thin dashed line.
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