The Panda’s Last Chance

 



The Panda’s Last Chance
Chinese authorities have devised an ambitious plan to save the giant panda from the ravages of
deforestation. Martin Williams assesses the creature’s chances of avoiding extinction.
The giant panda, the creature that has become a symbol of conservation, is facing extinction. The
major reason is loss of habitat, which has continued despite the establishment, since 1963, of 14
panda reserves. Deforestation, mainly earned out by farmers clearing land to make way for fields as
they move higher into the mountains, has drastically contracted the mammal’s range. The panda
has disappeared from much of central and eastern China, and is now restricted to the eastern flank
of the Himalayas in Sichuan and Gansu provinces, and the Qinling Mountains in Shanxi province.
Fewer than 1400 of the animals are believed to remain in the wild.

 Satellite imagery has shown the seriousness of the situation; almost half of the panda’s habitat
has been cut or degraded since 1975. Worse, the surviving panda population has also become
fragmented; a combination of satellite imagery and ground surveys reveals panda Islands in patches
of forest separated by cleared land. The population of these islands, ranging from fewer than ten to
more than 50 pandas, has become isolated because the animals are bath to cross open areas. Just
putting a road through panda habitat may be enough to split a population in two


 The minuscule size of the panda populations worries conservationists. The smallest groups have
too few animals to be viable, and will inevitably die out. The larger populations may be viable in the
short term, but will be susceptible to genetic defects as a result of inbreeding,

 In these circumstances, a more traditional threat to pandas-the cycle of flowering and
subsequent withering of the bamboo that is their staple food-can become literally species-
threatening. The flowerings prompt pandas to move from one area to another, thus preventing
inbreeding in otherwise sedentary populations. In panda Islands, however, bamboo flowering could
prove catastrophic because the pandas are unable to emigrate.

 The latest conservation management plan for the panda, prepared by China’s Ministry of Forestry
and the World Wide Fund for Nature, aims primarily to maintain panda habitats and to ensure that
populations are linked wherever possible. The plan will change some existing reserve boundaries,
establish 14 new reserves and protect or replant corridors of forest between panda islands. Other
measures include better control of poaching, which remains a problem despite strict laws, as panda
skins fetch high prices; reducing the degradation of habitats outside reserves, and reforestation.

The plan is ambitious. Implementation will be expensive-Yuan 56.6 million (US$ 12.5 million) will
be needed for the development of the panda reserves- and will require participation by individuals
ranging from villagers to government officials.

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