Kim Min-seok, a freshman in the Department of Forest and Environmental Systems at Kookmin University (advisor: Professor Lim Chul-Hee), won the Outstanding Poster Award at the “2026 Joint Conference on Forest Science”—an exceptional achievement for an undergraduate student. The Joint Conference on Forest Science is the largest academic conference in the forestry field in Korea, jointly organized by the Korean Society of Forest Science and six other forestry-related academic organizations.

Kim Min-seok won the Outstanding Poster Award for his presentation titled “Identifying the Threshold of Lowland Coniferous Forests as Carbon Sinks through AI-Based Time Series Analysis.” Based on 35 years of long-term time-series data from forested areas in Gangwon Province, he calculated early warning indicators to assess changes in the vitality of these forests. Through correlation analysis with meteorological data, he empirically demonstrated that the loss of resilience in Gangwon Province’s coniferous forests is closely linked to temperature factors. In particular, the study found that coniferous forests in Gangwon Province’s forested areas are losing their resilience more rapidly than other tree species, highlighting the need to address climate change.
 
Kim Min-seok, a student who began his research at the Global Climate Change Research Laboratory (Advisor: Lim Chul-Hee) through the Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation’s winter undergraduate internship program, continued his diligent research during the break, leading to a presentation at an academic conference. His efforts were recognized with the Outstanding Poster Award. This is regarded as an excellent example of university-level support for undergraduate researchers bearing fruit.
 
Kim Min-seok expressed his aspirations, stating, “Starting with this research, I hope to become a researcher dedicated to solving forest-related issues in Korea and globally caused by climate change.”