Wildlife
Overview
Wildlife (野生生物, wildlife) is a collective term for animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms that live in a natural state, obtaining food and reproducing on their own without direct human breeding or cultivation. Wildlife adapts to its respective habitats, forms regionally distinctive ecosystems, and provides ecosystem services on which humans depend through food chains and material cycles. Today, it is treated not merely as a natural resource but as a key indicator of biodiversity and planetary environmental health.
Main Content
Definition and Scope
Traditionally, wildlife referred to animals living in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and oceans untouched by humans, but the concept has recently expanded to include individuals inhabiting urban green spaces or agricultural land and livestock that have returned to the wild (feral animals). The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and national laws often define wildlife as populations in natural habitats rather than under breeding or management. Conversely, individuals managed in laboratories or zoos are generally not considered wildlife.
Role in Ecosystems
Predators regulate prey populations, preventing overgrazing and food competition, while large herbivores alter vegetation structure and create habitats for other species. Birds, bats, and insects are responsible for pollination and seed dispersal, contributing to the maintenance and spread of plant communities. In addition, scavengers and soil microorganisms that decompose carcasses cycle nutrients and maintain soil fertility. In this way, wildlife functions not as a matter of individual species but as a network of interactions, and the disappearance of one species can produce cascading ecological effects.
Threat Factors
The greatest threats are habitat destruction and fragmentation. Development of roads, housing sites, and industrial complexes fragments habitats, isolates populations, and lowers genetic diversity. Added to this are range shifts caused by climate change, overexploitation and poaching, illegal wildlife trade, invasive alien species, pollution such as pesticides and plastics, roadkill, and the spread of zoonotic infectious diseases, all acting in combination. Habitat fragmentation, in particular, is a direct cause of population decline in mobile large mammals and amphibians.
Conservation and Management
Conservation takes place at multiple levels, including designation of protected habitat areas, installation of ecological corridors, restoration of degraded land, species restoration and breeding and release, disease surveillance, and enforcement against illegal trade. Recently, along with spatial planning to enhance habitat connectivity, precision monitoring using observation technologies such as camera traps, drones, satellite tracking, and environmental DNA (eDNA) has become widespread. Citizen science programs also play an important role in broad distribution surveys.
Law and Institutions
Korea designates and protects endangered wildlife as Class I and Class II under the Wildlife Protection and Management Act and the Natural Environment Conservation Act, and operates the Ecological and Natural Map and the Baekdudaegan Protected Area system. Internationally, representative instruments include the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and the Ramsar Convention, while the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework presented the so-called 30x30 goal of designating 30 percent of land and sea as protected areas by 2030.
Relationship with Humans
Wildlife is a source of food and medicine, a resource for ecotourism, and deeply involved in local culture and symbolic systems. On the other hand, human-wildlife conflicts also exist due to crop damage, livestock predation, and urban appearances. Infectious diseases arising at the interface with wildlife, such as avian influenza, rabies, and severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome, demonstrate the need for a One Health approach that considers public health and ecological conservation together.
Latest Trends
In 2024-2025, as review of implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Framework began in earnest, updating national biodiversity strategies became a major issue. The European Union institutionalized obligations to restore degraded ecosystems through the Nature Restoration Law, and meetings of the CITES Conference of the Parties and the CBD Conference of the Parties discussed illegal wildlife trade and the sharing of marine and digital sequence information. On the technological side, AI-based image interpretation and environmental DNA analysis are lowering the cost of species surveys and supporting conservation decision-making, and research on movement routes using satellite tracking is being used to assess collision risks with renewable energy facilities. Domestically, the achievements and management challenges of restoration projects such as those for Asiatic black bears and foxes have been highlighted together, and the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza to wild mammals has emerged as a new surveillance target. In urban areas, there is a trend toward expanding roadkill reduction facilities, waste management, and citizen reporting systems in response to wildlife appearances.
Related Topics
- [[Biodiversity]]
- [[Ecosystem]]
- [[Endangered Species]]
- [[Climate Change]]
- [[Nature Conservation]]
- [[National Park]]