Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour home to more than 30 coral species, researchers find
- High level of coral growth put down to success of government’s harbour area treatment scheme
- Researchers plan to map coral growth and upload results to special website for public education
Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour boasts 35 species of coral, an unprecedented underwater survey by City University has found.
Researchers, who released their findings on Wednesday, attributed the high level of biodiversity to the success of the harbour area treatment scheme (HATS) by the government in the early 2010s, which significantly improved water quality.
“Conservation efforts between land and sea are very different because we could easily assess the change in forest size with satellite images … but we had not been able to do so underwater,” project manager Jeffery Chung Tzu-hao said.
“This project allows us to utilise various techniques to map the coral communities, identify the spots with high biodiversity, and help the government or research institutions advance their environmental management strategies.”
Professor Leo Chan Lai, the survey’s principal investigator, said Hong Kong had a wide variety of habitats, with stony coral species, mostly located in eastern waters, outnumbering those in the Caribbean, and which accounted for 10 per cent of the world’s total.