Shui Hau Wan on Lantau Island serves as a vital intertidal nursery habitat for juvenile horseshoe crabs, a globally endangered marine species within Hong Kong’s coastal ecosystem. Rising casual tourist foot traffic creates major threats. Unaware beach-goers frequently trample tiny buried juveniles, which stands as the leading local cause of horseshoe-crab fatalities. Eco-Counter Limited installed PYRO-Box Evo pedestrian-monitoring equipment from April 2026, supplying visitor statistics to identify high-risk overlapping windows between human visits and crab activity.
The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) team previously relied only on rough manual estimates of visitor numbers. Staff could not accurately pinpoint peak visiting hours that coincide with low-tide feeding periods for young horseshoe crabs.
AFCD regularly arranged on-site visitor-education events to reduce trampling incidents, yet there was no reliable metric to compare visitor flow before and after these outreach activities and measure real-world behavioral change.
Without quantified visitation records, the authority struggled to deploy ranger patrols strategically, justify their public-education strategy, and legislate human-wildlife conflicts.
Eco-Counter Limited deployed our discreet, battery-based, IP-68 rated weather-proof PYRO-Box Evo automatic pedestrian counting sensors at two major entry points this year. Our counters captured hourly visitor volumes across tidal cycles, weekends, public holidays and scheduled AFCD education sessions.
All continuous counting datasets are synchronized onto the cloud-based data analysis platform. The AFCD team cross-references visitor trends against horseshoe crab active hours, and compares foot-traffic patterns before and after conservation events to assess the effectiveness of education efforts. No labor-intensive manual site surveys are required for long-term monitoring.
Our people data revealed that:
· Weekend visitor numbers is more than the weekday footfall on the inter-tidal flat
· Public holidays created sudden visitor surges far above regular weekend-time traffic
· The highest-risk trampling window fell between low-tide hours, when juvenile horseshoe crabs came out to feed just as most day-trippers arrived for clam-digging
The data can help site managers introduce targeted visiting-hour restrictions for sensitive zones during high-risk low-tide periods and optimize the placement of wildlife-awareness signage in the future.
By pinpointing overlaps between peak tourist hours and horseshoe-crab feeding activity, our monitoring system safeguards the endangered coastal species. The continuous flow-tracking system also empowers AFCD to measure, review and improve its on-site public education campaigns, striking a sustainable balance for public recreation and the long-term survival of Hong Kong’s precious marine wildlife in Lantau.