China West Normal University Published Research Results on "Wild Giant Panda Microhabitat"

The giant panda rests on its stomach [Photo by Xu Jun]

On July 5, 2020, "Microhabitat Selection by Giant Pandas"，the latest research result of China West Normal University’s key laboratory of Wildlife Conservation of Ministry of Education,, was published in the journal Biological Conservation which is the flagship journal in the field of conservation science and the TOP journal of environmental science and ecology.

In order to fully explain the basic scientific problem of microhabitat selection for giant pandas in the wild, a research team led by researcher Zhang Jindong and Professor Zhou Caiquan from China West Normal University cooperated with scientists from China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Michigan State University and University of Florida in the United States. Based on the GPS tracking data of giant pandas in the wild and the accumulated data of decades of investigation and research, the accurate key sites of occurrence and the range of activists of wild giant pandas were obtained and analyzed, and a resource selection formation (RSF) was constructed on the microhabitat scale to study the characteristics of microhabitat selection and utilization of giant pandas.

The research results took the core habitat of giant panda as the investigation object, and effectively combined the intensity of habitat utilization and selection preference of giant panda. The results showed that the core habitat area of giant panda  is higher in elevation, with more animal paths and high density bamboo forest. This finding reveals that bamboo density and animal accessibility play an important role in establishing the core home range of wild giant panda habitats. It is suggested that priority should be given to the protection of dense bamboo forests under a certain canopy, and attention should be paid to the dispersal path of giant panda activities in order to protect and restore high-quality panda habitats.