Hong Kong geography, habitats and wasps sampling

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region covers an area of one thousand square kilometres, with two fifth of it being the city. The rest of the land is undeveloped. The Hong Kong's topography is extremely rugged. It is composed of a series of volcanic mountain ridges with highest peaks at 950 m., lowland valleys and coastal areas. Climatically this elevational differences are enough to define unique communities of wasps. Hong Kong has a subtropical climate characterised by wet and dry monsoons (HK Observatory data). The eastern parts of Hong Kong receiving most of the rainfall and western parts about half less. Most of the annual rainfall happens in the period from May to September with Typhoons causing  the highest precipitation.

Due to its geographic position, topography, and climate Hong Kong is home to a number of different habitat types and environmental gradients, each likely to harbor  different communities of wasps, with some species unique to a particular habitat or specialist in the use of a specific microhabitat. The dominant historical terrestrial habitat type in Hong Kong is forest, but due to past human pressure on the landscape much of this has been removed and regrown over time, resulting in a mosaic landscape of fragmented forest patches at different successional stages. Additionally, past and current anthropogenic land uses have resulted in large areas of grassland, scrub, fallow fields, farmland and numerous villages, towns and urban centres.

We aim to sample across six different habitat types with standardised sampling of the Malaise trapping: 

Each habitat type are sampled across the territory of Hong Kong.