Beyond Greening: Forest Recovery, Biodiversity Change and Resilience in Hong Kong (A 70-Year Perspective from Remote Sensing and Field Ecology)

Hong Kong's forest landscapes have undergone substantial changes over the past seven decades, following historical deforestation, wartime degradation, recurrent fires, and subsequent conservation and afforestation efforts. Since the mid-1940s, natural regeneration has contributed to the expansion of secondary forests, particularly from remnant vegetation in valleys and sheltered locations. However, the patterns and rates of recovery have varied considerably across the landscape, raising important questions about the extent to which forest regeneration has also restored biodiversity and ecological functions.

Drawing on more than a decade of research, this seminar presents an integrated assessment of forest recovery in Hong Kong, combining historical aerial photographs, satellite remote sensing, GIS-based landscape analysis, and extensive field-based ecological surveys, particularly in Tai Mo Shan and Shing Mun Country Parks. The research reconstructs changes in forest extent, successional stages, and landscape configuration over approximately 70 years, alongside field investigations of vegetation structure, species richness, species composition, and ecological community assembly.

The seminar examines the spatial and environmental factors influencing natural forest regeneration, including topography, landscape connectivity, and species dispersal. It highlights the differences between structural forest recovery and biodiversity recovery, drawing on studies of species accumulation, compositional turnover, and phylogenetic diversity. The impacts of fires, extreme cold events, and typhoons are also examined to understand the vulnerability and resilience of regenerating forests, together with the relative contributions of natural regeneration and plantation-based restoration.

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