The Giant Panda National Park released on Thursday an undated photo taken by an infrared camera showing a wild giant panda and a cub drinking water, in Fengyongzhai of Ya’an city, Southwest China’s Sichuan Province. Photo: IC

 
Dramatic global changes to the environment have wrought unprecedented reductions in biodiversity, indicating the arrival of the sixth mass extinction. This extinction crisis is manifest in the listing of more than 30,000 species assessed by IUCN as threatened with extinction. China's rich natural heritage features high levels of biodiversity comprising more than 10% of terrestrial vertebrates and vascular plants globally, half of which are endemic. To protect this biodiversity treasure trove, during the past decades the Chinese government has signed onto inter-governmental environmental conventions, enacted sweeping laws and regulations, and launched major conservation programs. Beginning with the Wildlife Protection Law of the 1980s, China took significant measures to protect its wildlife, including a legal framework with specific species listed due to endangerment or economic or scientific value, such as giant pandas, big cats, monkeys, gibbons, dolphins and ungulates. Particularly, the giant panda conservation program has been a good example and made a great achievement.

The giant panda was one of the most endangered mammals on earth, a flagship species for wildlife conservation. Its evolutionary history can be traced back 7-8 Ma to the late Miocene and the earliest recorded ancestor, the primal panda (Ailurarctos lufengens) is in Yunnan province, China. Later, the pygmy panda (A. microta) appeared in the early Pleistocene and had the smallest body size of all known pandas, but sometime in the mid-Pleistocene it evolved into the largest known panda, A. melanoleuca baconi. The extant species (or subspecies) of the giant panda (A. melanoleuca) is believed to have arisen in the Holocene. Because of human-induced habitat loss and fragmentation, the giant panda remains restricted to six isolated mountain ranges across China: The Qinling, Minshan, Qionglai, Liangshan, Daxiangling, and Xiaoxiangling Mountains. According to the Forth National Survey of Giant Pandas completed in 2013, it was estimated there are 1,864 animals in the wild across 25,766 km2 of habitat. Based on this number, the giant panda no longer meets the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) criteria for Endangered and has be downlisted to Vulnerable. This is absolutely a great achievement, and this comes with a long hard way.

During the long-term history, the giant panda experience remarkably population fluctuation. We reconstructed a continuous demographic history of pandas from their origin to the present and indicated two population expansions, two bottlenecks and two divergences. Evidence showed that, whereas global changes in climate were the primary drivers of population fluctuation for millions of years, human activities likely underlie recent population divergence and serious decline. In all three populations identified, anthropogenic activities have negatively affected pandas for 3,000 years. In fact, human activities had deeply affected this species and almost brought them to the brink of extinction. Research indicated the endangerment of giant pandas was closely related to environmental pressures brought by growing human populations throughout the Chinese history. Deforestation, road and settlement construction, land reclamation, mineral exploitation, and large water engineering projects and even poaching were the primary risk factors to pandas: they caused habitat loss and fragmentation, and amplify the severity of natural disturbances, making panda populations more prone to local extinction. Diseases such as panda canine distemper virus, canine parvovirus, and future climate changes would also impact the survival of pandas. In general, the endangerment status should be attributed to extrinsic factors rather than intrinsic ones, and the role of humans in threatening the viability of panda populations is unquestionable.

To solve these problems, the Chinese government has implemented laws and the Nature Reserve Management Regulations over the past decades. In 1988, the Chinese Government enacted the Wildlife Protection Law to protect endangered animals from human interference and persecution. Since then, poaching has been banned and poachers have been severely punished. National conservation measures for giant pandas or closely related national initiatives have been taken to save giant pandas, including the ban of poaching, the panda habitat protection project, panda nature reserve network, natural forest protection project, and the Grain to Green project. These endeavors have led to significant conservation achievements: poaching has been eradicated; 67 giant panda nature reserves have been established protecting approximately 54% of panda habitats with over 66% of individuals; the fourth national survey showed a population increase and habitat expansion. Recently, the Giant Panda National Park has been established and this will put the giant panda conservation to a new height. 

For the wild pandas, small populations are particularly vulnerable to threats. Considering the high degree of panda habitat fragmentation and the fact that small isolated populations are affected by random factors within and outside the populations, in-situ conservation measures alone cannot guarantee their long-term survival. Instead, releasing captive individuals to the targeted populations could be an effective way to increase the population size and genetic diversity. With advancements in captive breeding techniques, captive panda populations have increased rapidly, reaching 600 individuals by the end of 2019, providing a foundation for reintroduction. In the last decade, the State Forestry Administration officially implemented the panda reintroduction project, and has successively translocated or reintroduced more than ten individuals to the wild. One of which, "Luxin", even successfully reproduced and produced offspring. Although the panda reintroduction is a long-term process which faces many challenges, fortunately, current reintroduction programs are progressing well, and more captive individuals will be released into the wild in the future to save isolated small populations or to reestablish new panda populations. This project has been noted by the prestigious journal Science as "Hope for Wild Pandas".

Another approach to rescue isolated small populations is to construct habitat corridors. The establishment of habitat corridors can connect isolated habitat patches to facilitate the migration and dispersal of individuals, thus increasing inter-population gene flow. In addition to improving their population viability through reintroduction, habitat corridor construction is also of great significance in connecting isolated habitat patches and increasing interpopulation gene flow for small populations threatened by habitat fragmentation. At present, several corridors are being planned or under construction, such as the Nibashan Corridor in Daxiangling Mountains, and Huangtuliang Corridor and Tudiling Corridor in Minshan Mountains. We believe that these corridors will play pivotal roles in the conservation of these isolated small populations. 

The long-term population monitoring of the wild populations plays a key role in the giant panda conservation. Since 1970s, the Chinese government has conducted four national surveys on the giant panda and the habitat at an interval about 10 years, which is unique in the animal conservation history in the world. These surveys provide important information to guide the conservation management of wild pandas. The past two surveys, which employed the same methodologies to allow the evaluation of trends, indicate that the panda population has increased from an estimated 1,596 in 2004 to 1,864 in 2014. These surveys also showed that after China's National Conservation Project for the Giant Panda and Its Habitat (NCPGPH) was implemented, the panda habitat increased 105.4% from 1990 to 2010. 

Scientific research is vital for the biodiversity conservation, which help to understand conservation applications and build conservation confidence. A pessimistic view on the giant pandas is that this species has come to the evolutionary dead-end or evolutionary cul-de-sac, because of their specialized bamboo diet, phylogenetic changes in body size, small population, low genetic diversity, and low reproductive rate. However, our studies do not support this. This is because: First, giant pandas have evolved different levels of adaptations to the specialized bamboo diet, such as morphology (pseudo-thumbs), behavior (optimal foraging strategies), physiology (low metabolism), genetics/genomics (pseudogenization in umami receptor gene) and metagenomics (unique microbiome). Second, giant pandas have high reproductive rates and positive population growth. Third, giant pandas still maintain high genetic diversity and evolutionary potential. Last but not least, the plentiful bamboo resources in panda habitats should not be a limiting factor for population expansion. These findings strongly indicate the giant panda is not a relic species or an "evolutionary cul-de-sac", and address the pessimistic perception of panda's future prospects and destiny prevalent in some sectors of the scientific community and the public.

Investment in panda protection can be a beneficial strategy not only for pandas, but also for human and other species. Study indicated the estimated ecosystem service value from pandas and their reserves falls between US$ 2.6 - 6.9 billion/year in 2010. Protecting the panda as an umbrella species and the habitat that supports it yields significant societal benefits, about 10 - 27 times the cost of maintaining the current reserves, motivating expansion of panda reserves and investments in natural capital in China. Thus, we believe policy makers and society in general will take note and question reluctance to invest in panda conservation. The science-based practical conservation measures and the corresponding achievements foretell a bright future for the pandas, and make the panda conservation a successful story in the world.

The giant panda conservation is always on the way, in the future, here's what we can do next to protect such a remarkable species well. First, make habitat protection and restoration the top priority; Second, implement scientific reintroduction programs and habitat corridor construction to rescue isolated small populations, for example, the selection of captive individuals for reintroduction should consider their geographic origin, genetic background, and genetic contribution to wild populations; Third, reinforce scientific research to provide a robust baseline for the science-based conservation approaches; Forth, increase attention to the threats of parasites and viral infections to the populations in the face of global climate change; Finally, develop new methodological tools for the survey and long-term monitoring of the wild populations. We wish the giant panda a bright future.

The author is an academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Biology, Institute of Zoology in Chinese Academy of Sciences