Question: What is the population size of the place that is connected by the Lotus Bridge to the Cotai reclamation area of Macau?

Context paragraphs:
Rural Canada: Rural Canada has many faces and many dimensions (social, cultural, economic, etc.) but the common element of most conceptualizations of "rural" is the spatial dimension.  Rural is primarily low population density, small population size, and distance from high population density and big size.  Not surprisingly, the prevailing definitions of “rural” (in Canada as in most countries) emphasize this spatial dimension.  Rural Canada is usually defined by measures of population density, population size and distance from major agglomerations.

Cotai Strip: The Cotai Strip is a term coined by American Las Vegas Sands Corporation with regard to its building of a strip of hotel-casinos in the Cotai section of Macau, a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China.  Cotai was the result of a major land reclamation project which joined the two islands of Coloane and Taipa, and is part of the Macau government's continuous efforts to expand the region's territory.  The reclaimed land in Cotai is to be mainly used for casino developments and Las Vegas Sands Corporation envisioned that their development of several adjacent properties would comprise an area that would resemble the Las Vegas Strip, albeit on a considerably smaller scale.

Lótus Bridge: Lotus Bridge () is a cross-border bridge linking the Cotai reclamation area of Macau with Hengqin Island in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, People's Republic of China (PRC).  The bridge is the road crossing between mainland China and Macau.  This border crossing is open between 9:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.

Effective population size: The effective population size is the number of individuals that an idealised population would need to have, in order for some specified quantity of interest to be the same in the idealised population as in the real population.  Idealised populations are based on unrealistic but convenient simplifications such as random mating, simultaneous birth of each new generation, constant population size, and equal numbers of children per parent.  While in some simple scenarios, the effective population size can be equal to the number of breeding individuals in the population, for most quantities of interest and most real populations, the census population size "N" of a real population is usually larger than the effective population size "N".  The same population may have multiple effective population sizes, for different properties of interest, including for different genetic loci.

Watterson estimator: In population genetics, the Watterson estimator is a method for describing the genetic diversity in a population.  It is estimated by counting the number of polymorphic sites.  It is a measure of the "population mutation rate" (the product of the effective population size and the neutral mutation rate) from the observed nucleotide diversity of a population.  formula_1, where formula_2 is the effective population size and formula_3 is the per-generation mutation rate of the population of interest ( ).  The assumptions made are that there is a sample of formula_4 haploid individuals from the population of interest, that there are infinitely many sites capable of varying (so that mutations never overlay or reverse one another), and that formula_5.

Hengqin: Hengqin, sometimes known as Ilha de Montanha in Portuguese"," is an island in Zhuhai, a prefecture-level city and Special Economic Zone in the Guangdong province of the People's Republic of China.  It has a population of about 3,000.  Parts of Hengqin are leased to Macau by the State Council of the People's Republic of China in 2009.

Stepwise mutation model: The stepwise mutation model (SMM) is a mathematical theory, developed by Motoo Kimura and Tomoko Ohta, that allows for investigation of the equilibrium distribution of allelic frequencies in a finite population where neutral alleles are produced in step-wise fashion.  The original model assumes that if an allele has a mutation that causes it to change in state, mutations that occur in repetitive regions of the genome will increase or decrease by a single repeat unit at a fixed rate (i.e. by the addition or subtraction of one repeat unit per generation) and these changes in allele states are expressed by an integer (. . . A-1, A, A1, . .  .) .  The model also assumes random mating and that all alleles are selectively equivalent for each locus.  The SMM is distinguished from the Kimura-Crow model, also known as the infinite alleles model (IAM), in that as the population size increases to infinity, while the product of the N (effective population size) and the mutation rate is fixed, the mean number of different alleles in the population rapidly reaches a peak and plateaus, at which time that value is almost the same as the effective number of alleles.

Flat-headed cat: The flat-headed cat ("Prionailurus planiceps") is a small wild cat patchily distributed in the Thai-Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Sumatra.  Since 2008, it has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List due to destruction of wetlands in its habitat.  It is suspected that the effective population size could be fewer than 2,500 mature individuals, with no subpopulation having an effective population size larger than 250 adult individuals.

Genetic monitoring: Genetic monitoring is the use of molecular markers to (i) identify individuals, species or populations, or (ii) to quantify changes in population genetic metrics (such as effective population size, genetic diversity and population size) over time.  Genetic monitoring can thus be used to detect changes in species abundance and/or diversity, and has become an important tool in both conservation and livestock management.  The types of molecular markers used to monitor populations are most commonly mitochondrial, microsatellites or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), while earlier studies also used allozyme data.  Species gene diversity is also recognized as an important biodiversity metric for implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Macau Light Rail Transit: The Macau Light Rapid Transit or Macau LRT also known as Metro Ligeiro de Macau is a mass transit system in Macau under construction.  It will serve the Macau Peninsula, Taipa and Cotai, serving major border checkpoints such as the Border Gate, the Outer Harbour Ferry Terminal, the Lotus Bridge Border and the Macau International Airport.

Supporting paragraphs: Lótus Bridge Hengqin
Answer: 3,000