Kyo Soung Koo

Senior Researcher, Korea Institute of Environmental Geography

Focus regions: Palearctic

Kyo Soung Koo is a conservation biologist who first became fascinated by nature as a child, when he spent his days catching frogs and exploring the outdoors. That early fascination led him to pursue biology, and today he works to protect the small amphibians that first sparked his dream. His academic research centers on amphibian and reptile ecology, habitat use, species distribution, and conservation in South Korea, with a focus on improving the reliability of ecological data and supporting evidence-based conservation planning.

ORCID·ResearchGate·Instagram

Contributions

From the journals

Beyond the Paddy Fields: Riparian Reed Beds as Essential Natural Habitat for the Critically Endangered Suweon Treefrog, Dryophytes suweonensis

Koo, K. S., Park, E. J., Jin, S. N., & Yun, K. S. · Ecology and Evolution · July 2026

If surveys of the Suweon treefrog (Dryophytes suweonensis) are confined to flooded rice paddies during the breeding season, the species may appear to be a rice-paddy specialist. Our pre-breeding surveys in Pyeongtaek showed extensive use of reed-dominated riparian wetlands and emergent vegetation along waterways, with no detections inside paddies. This indicates that breeding-season sampling can bias habitat inference and obscure the importance of natural reed beds during much of the annual cycle, more broadly highlighting how seasonally or spatially restricted surveys may distort inferred habitat associations in threatened species. Rice paddies remain important breeding habitat, but conservation planning and monitoring should also account for non-breeding habitats that sustain populations year-round.

Back to Contributors