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Shrinking Living Area Endangers Giant Panda, Says WWF
The disappearance and fragmentation of its rugged mountain forest home are the "major extinction threats" to the endangered Giant Panda, said a world conservation body in a report published Thursday.
According to the report of the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF), in China's southwestern Sichuan province, where the biggest number of Giant Pandas struggles for survival, suitable habitat occupied by pandas shrank by 50 percent between 1974 and 1989. A survey, conducted in 1999 in one county in Sichuan, revealed that since 1987 there has been a 30 percent decrease in panda habitat.
"Habitat fragmentation is especially dangerous for pandas, as they must adjust to the life cycles of bamboos, which flower and die periodically," said Dr. Lu Zhi, co-author of the report and former co-ordinator of WWF's Panda Program in China.
"Small, isolated populations of Giant Pandas, whose diet consists almost entirely of various bamboo species found in high mountain areas, face a risk of inbreeding. This could lead to reduced resistance to disease, less adaptability to environmental change, and a decrease in reproductive rates," the report noted.
There are around 1,000 Giant Pandas remaining in the wild and a new panda census is underway, according to the WWF. The results of the three-year National Survey of the Giant Panda and its Habitat, launched by the WWF in collaboration with the Chinese government in 1999, should set the trend for future conservation efforts, it added.
As the first international conservation organization to begin fieldwork in China in 1980, the 40-year-old WWF has supported a variety of conservation activities over the past 21 years, including participation in the first Giant Panda census and the drafting of a Giant Panda management plan.
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