Hong Kong sees marked achievements on biodiversity conservation
Let’s go and explore the beauty of nature
Hong Kong Biodiversity Information Hub (HKBIH)
China is among the 12 mega-biodiverse countries in the world. Forest cover accounts for 20.36% of the total land area, while the stock volume of forest plantations may be the largest in the world, harboring abundant and diverse wildlife.
In Hong Kong, the Government has also published the “Hong Kong Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan 2016-2021” (BSAP) in December 2016. Under the BSAP, four Action Areas and a total of 67 Specific Actions were proposed, in order to step up biodiversity conservation and support sustainable development in the next five years.
It was our pleasure to be appointed by the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) to develop the website of Hong Kong Biodiversity Information Hub (HKBIH).
Previously, local biodiversity information is scattered across different platforms within and outside AFCD. Information on some of these platforms were linked to various internal systems. As they serve different purposes and were developed separately, these internal systems have different structures, contents, functions, data formats, etc. As biodiversity information was scattered across different platforms, the general public had to access multiple websites if they would like to obtain local biodiversity information of various aspects, making information access complicated and inconvenient. It was also not easy for the general public to find information about local biodiversity. Furthermore, information on less-well studied species groups, including insects and marine species, were not readily available in the public domain, resulting in a knowledge gap.
By consolidating various sources of biodiversity information into a single and user-friendly website, the information hub is expected to help improve knowledge-sharing, strengthen stakeholders’ ability to understand and communicate biodiversity and ultimately, build capacity that can facilitate better decision-making.
As usual, our ZMS solution was also employed to facilitate different authorised content owners to manage the contents on the Biodiversity Information Hub.
Please feel free to visit HKBIH (www.bih.gov.hk).
