The pandas’ shaggy ranks appear to be swelling deep in the Chinese wilderness. A national survey of the bamboo forests, completed in 2013, reported 1,864 giant pandas. The survey completed a decade before counted fewer than 1,600. Population numbers alone, though, paint an incomplete picture.
Using satellite data, a team of scientists mapped 40 years’ worth of changes in panda habitat, the researchers reported in a new study published Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Though there are more pandas, the area they live is in smaller than when the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, first listed pandas as endangered in 1988.
“This study is the first that provides a 40-year analysis of panda habitat changes across the entire panda range,” said Jianguo Liu, a Michigan State University environmental scientist and an author of the new work. “It shows that the panda habitat continued to decline until 2001, when the panda habitat began to recover.”
In September 2016, the IUCN upgraded the pandas from endangered, a status the species held for 28 years. The animals are now classified under the IUCN as vulnerable — not yet a healthy population, but a step back from extinction’s edge.
