**4. Landscape structure**

As the result of analysis on the landscape ecological map generated for Seoul, urban area occupied the widest as 60.8% of total area, secondary forests (12.7%), plantations (8.6%), river and reservoir (5.6%), landscape architectural plantation (4.5%), agricultural fields (2.5%), grasslands (2.4%), inaccessible area (2.3%), and bare ground (0.7%) followed (**Figure 3**). Forests composed of secondary forests and plantations and agricultural fields were usually concentrated to the city's fringe, and the urban center has little vegetation. Moreover, vegetation in the urban center was of low ecological quality, as most were fragmented into small patches and consisted of species introduced by landscape architects without ecological consideration or exotic plants [39, 40]. Therefore, green space showed severe imbalanced spatial distribution (**Figure 3**).

#### **Figure 3.**

*A map showing spatial distribution of vegetation and land-use types in the Seoul metropolitan area (redrawn from Seoul City [59]).*
