In the 1980s there were about 1,100 giant pandas left in the wild. There are now close to 1,900. The number is lovely, but the more interesting story is the shape of the land they live in. The Giant Panda National Park, declared in 2021, gathered 73 separate reserves into one protected whole across Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, some 22,000 square kilometres holding around seventy per cent of all wild pandas. Protected habitat has grown from 1.39 million hectares to 2.58 million. And running through it are six ecological corridors, green bridges of restored forest that reconnect thirteen panda populations which had spent decades cut off from one another by roads and farmland. A panda can now walk to meet a stranger, which is exactly what a small population needs.
Keeping track of a shy black and white bear in mountain forest used to be a matter of patience and luck. Now more than 1,500 infrared cameras and twenty drones watch the park alongside satellites, and facial recognition software has been trained to tell one panda from another, lifting monitoring efficiency by more than forty per cent. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences describe the change simply: conservation here has moved from being driven by experience to being driven by data. Eleven captive bred pandas have been released into the wild since 2003 and nine are still out there. And if you would like to see them for yourself, the Wolong reserve sits about 120 kilometres from Chengdu inside genuine panda country and is open all year, while Bifengxia, a little further out, is where the youngest ones are.
Our short take: reporting by Xinhua, with park and population figures from China's National Forestry and Grassland Administration and research comment from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.