Panda park provides 'umbrella protection'

Influence of habitat

The size and quality of the habitat can have a major influence on the animal's life span and population size. According to the results of the fourth national survey of giant pandas in 2015, the long-term effects of climate change and human activity have seen the population divide into 33 groups that have retreated to six mountain ranges, including the Qinling in Shaanxi, the Qionglai in Sichuan and the Minshan in Gansu.

Intense human activity has led to fluctuations in the number of giant pandas. The first national giant panda survey, conducted in the 1970s, showed that there were about 2,400 in the wild. In the 1980s, the second such survey showed that the number had fallen to about 1,100.

The decline was mainly due to shrinking habitats caused by large-scale deforestation projects at the time, according to the History, Current Situation and Prospects on Nature Reserves for Giant Pandas in China, a study published in 2011 by Chinese experts. Moreover, construction of highways and high-voltage transmission lines, and the development of tourism, had split the remaining habitats into sections.

The study's authors said that if the scattered conservation areas of mountain systems could be connected, a larger network of protected areas would promote the movement of individual pandas across different regions, which would boost stability and help the population grow.

Realizing the urgent need to protect the giant panda, the central government increased the number of nature reserves in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu from 15 in the 1980s to 63 in 2010, the study said.

As a result, a fourth survey — conducted in 2013, but not published until 2015 — showed there were more than 1,800 pandas by the end of 2013, compared with 1,596 recorded during the third survey at the end of 2003.

In 2016, a Sichuan government plan for the construction of giant panda corridors said the province had identified 13 such corridor belts that were distributed across major mountains.

The corridors serve as bridges that allow pandas to move between different habitats, so activities, including animal grazing and the collection of herbs for traditional Chinese medicine, are banned within them. Local governments have also planted bamboo and erected screens to prevent outside noise from penetrating the corridors.

In 2016, the rise in the panda population prompted the International Union for Conservation of Nature to reclassify the giant panda, downgrading its status from "endangered" to "vulnerable".

Despite the rise in numbers, the survival risks facing the small population as a result of the fragmentation of habitats still make long-term protection a major challenge.

In 2017, the central government approved the pilot plan for the Giant Panda National Park. The facility was designed to unify the management of dozens of nature reserves for the panda and other species in the three provinces, which now cooperate to conduct research and devise protection policies and their enforcement.

Last year, the park was officially established. It is not only home to about 87 percent of the country's giant pandas, but also more than 8,000 wild species of flora and fauna and about 120,000 people.