China Daily feature writer LI XING recently went on a field trip to
the nature reserves of Southwest China's Sichuan Province. The
first of her reports focuses on the Sichuan section of the third
national giant-panda survey conducted between 2000 and 2001 under
the supervision of the State Forestry Bureau.
After numerous attempts, Zhao Jianhua - a worker at the Wanglang
National Nature Reserve, north of the Sichuan provincial capital
Chengdu - finally built a small fire and sat down.
He
opened his wallet, took out a photo of his two-year-old son and
looked closely.
"I
didn't know if I could survive the night," he recalled, his eyes
glistening with tears.
One night in May 2000, darkness had fallen. Zhao and his local
guide had reached the deep gully in the Liangshan Mountains after
some 10 hours of trekking, sometimes in rain and hailstones.
And then they lost their way.
The gully was Zhao's destination for the day's field work. It is
part of the Dafengding Nature Reserve in Mabian County, some 220
kilometers south of Chengdu.
Zhao and 81 other members of the Sichuan provincial team started
field work for the Sichuan section of the third national survey of
giant pandas in the wild in May 2000.
The national survey covered the giant-panda habitats that now exist
only in three provinces - Sichuan, Northwest China's Gansu
bordering Sichuan to the north, and Shaanxi.
The survey in Sichuan was the most important since about 81.4
percent of giant pandas live in Sichuan. About 83.7 percent of
China's giant-panda habitats are located in the province, in one of
the three biggest forests in China.
Scientific Methods
Zhao and other field workers had undergone extensive training. The
team members included researchers with doctorates and master's
degrees in life sciences, forestry and natural resources. They
mainly comprised experts from the Sichuan Provincial Forestry
Academy and staff from national, provincial and county-level nature
reserves in Sichuan.
Wang Hongjia - then deputy director of the Sichuan provincial panda
survey team and now director of the Sichuan Provincial Station for
the Survey, Protection and Management of Wildlife Resources - said:
"Comprehensive scientific and technological preparation has been
the hallmark of the third national panda survey in Sichuan."
One of the technical architects of the survey was Wang Hao, a
lecturer at Peking University, whose doctoral dissertation
expounded in detail the survey methodology, habitat utilization and
population viability analysis in the study of giant-panda
conservation.
"Obtaining a more accurate population size of the giant panda - the
symbol of wildlife conservation - is one of the steps towards
designing a conservation policy, strategy and ways of management,"
he said.
Wang Hao served as a member of the technical expert consulting team
for the Sichuan part of the survey.
The survey methodology designed by Wang Hao integrated the research
results achieved by many scientists over the years, including the
survey methods used in the first two national surveys.
"I
was trying to expand on the previous methods and offer a more
scientific quantitative analysis," he said.
Wang Hao also got more scientific data from the research results
that Professor Pan Wenshi and his students from Peking University
accumulated in more than a decade of field studies on giant pandas
and their habitats in the Qinling Mountains in Northwest China's
Shaanxi Province.
As
one of Pan's students, Wang Hao spent much of his time as a
postgraduate student working in the Qinling Mountains.
Helped by donations from the Worldwide Fund for Nature (known as
the World Wildlife Fund in the United States and Canada), Wang Hao
co-operated with Professor Liu Shaoying and his associates and
students from Sichuan Provincial Forestry Academy to try to flesh
out the methodology at the Wanglang Nature Reserve in Pingwu County
in northern Sichuan. Liu and his associates and students also took
part in the field work between 2000 and 2001.
Wang's methodology became the standard method for the third
national giant-panda survey.
When Zhao Jianhua and the rest of his team were being trained, they
learned how to identify bamboo stem fragments and droppings left by
giant pandas. Renowned panda scholars Hu Jinchu of Nanchong
Teachers' College and George Schaller of the United States
researched giant pandas in Wolong, also in Sichuan Province. They
discovered a way to classify giant pandas into three age groups
according to the length of the bamboo stem fragments they left
behind.
They also learned to use an altimeter, a compass, cameras and a
Global Positioning System device little bigger than a television
remote control. They used the GPS device to determine the longitude
and latitude of the location where they saw wild pandas or found
panda footprints or droppings or bamboo stem fragments left by the
pandas.
During the training sessions, they also learned how to fill in
extensive survey sheets and note down the different families of
plants and other wild animals they spotted, among other
information.
An
important part of the team's job was to conduct socio-economic
surveys in communities neighboring the panda habitats and reserves.
They would gather first-hand information on the lives of the local
people, whose ways of life and attitudes constitute an important
factor in the protection of the wildlife and ecosystem.
All the data Zhao and other field workers collected during the 20
months of the survey, which ended last December, have been fed into
computers using geographic information systems (GIS) technology and
specially designed software.
The information is still being processed and analyzed, according to
Wang Hongjia.
Initial survey results have shown that the Wolong National Nature
Reserve still has the largest number of giant pandas. The reserve
covers 2,000 square kilometres and is located mainly in the
Qionglai Mountains.
While Zhao Jianhua and other field workers received extensive
technical training, Wang Hongjia, Wang Hao and other experts mapped
out the localities to be surveyed. In the end, the survey areas
covered 184 townships and 27 giant-panda reserves under the
jurisdiction of 38 counties or seven prefectural level cities and
three ethnic-minority autonomous prefectures.
Wang Hongjia said: "The national ban on the logging of natural
woods and the project to return hilly land back to woodland enabled
us to expand the survey area compared with the second national
survey."
Covering 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres), the survey areas
in Sichuan lie in the province's five major mountain ranges - the
Daxiangling, Liangshan, Minshan, Qionglai and Xiaoxiangling
mountains.
There were 6,898 actual routes - mainly deep mountain gullies that
Zhao Jianhua and other field workers had to trek.
When field work started, experts as well as field workers soon
discovered that the arduous work tested not only their physical
ability but also their tenacity and courage, as they were often the
first people to venture into some of the deep gullies.
Lei Kaiming, a team member from the Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve,
said: "Don't ask me how many gullies I went into. I simply lost
count."
The deep mountain ravines were often treacherous.
After Zhao Jianhua and his local guide lost their way in the
Dafengding Nature Reserve in the Liangshan Mountains, they stopped
at a hillside to wait for other team members.
At
11 pm, they heard the others calling. But Zhao's local guide, of
the Yi ethnic minority, forbade Zhao to answer their calls for fear
that he might wake the mountain ghost, according to a Yi ethnic
tradition.
In
the end, Zhao and the guide had to spend the night in the open.
Snow fell in the small hours. "Other team members found us early
the next morning," Zhao said.
But Wang Hongjia said Zhao's experience was not unique.
Quite a number of team members had to wade through ice-cold water
and spend the night in remote valleys during the survey. They often
had to follow narrow trails opened up by takins, large
goat-antelopes also under State protection.
Huang Xiaofu, who was 23 when he joined the team, fell off a
20-metre-high cliff. A tiny part of his skull is now covered with a
small alloy sheet, said Wang Hongjia.
Harvesting Rewards
Wang Hongjia and other team members said that their hard work on
the national survey also reaped huge rewards.
Zhao Jianhua said: "By looking at the thickness and shades of the
forests and the growth of the bamboo, I'd know if the patch was
frequented by the giant pandas."
Lei Kaiming said he could not forget the moment when he spotted a
giant panda running in what is called Xihuo Gully deep in the
Wolong National Nature Reserve.
"The giant panda disappeared from my sight when I took out my
camera," he said with regret.
Many of the survey team members interviewed said they learned a
great deal not only about giant pandas but also about nature as a
whole, the importance of maintaining biodiversity, the existing
ecosystem and the harmony between man and nature.
"The virgin forests I have seen during the survey maintain thick
humus carpets from the litter of half-decayed leaves, twigs and
logs. This conserves the moisture and water in the soil," said Zhao
Jianhua, who had a secondary technical education. "But the hills
that have undergone heavy logging could retain only very little
water and do little to prevent soil erosion."
Zhao Lianjun, now 28 and also from the Wanglang National Nature
Reserve, graduated from a secondary technical school after studying
nature-reserve management. Now proficient in computer data
processing, Zhao has risen to become one of the team's leading
computer technicians.
Wang Hongjia said that the national survey has helped train a large
number of knowledgeable nature-reserve workers, who will be
instrumental in promoting the ideas of environmental and
nature-reserve protection and sustainable development and in
nature-reserve management.
Above all, Wang Hongjia and his colleagues have ascertained the
giant-panda habitats and the actual spread of the giant pandas in
Sichuan. They have learned the distribution of the bamboo species
that the giant panda eats and of the other animals that share the
panda's habitat.
They also gathered information on the effect of human activity upon
giant-panda habitats and on the conflicts between local rural
communities and giant-panda reserves.
"All these data provide us with a scientific basis to monitor the
giant pandas and their habitats and will help us to work out
effective protection policies and a long-term management plan,"
Wang Hongjia said.
"We will not only protect the existing panda habitats but also take
care of the areas that could potentially become homes of the giant
panda," he said.
What worries Wang Hongjia most is how to reconcile nature
conservation with economic development.
He
noted that the communities neighboring most of the giant-panda
reserves are plagued with poverty.
In
spring, when bamboo shoots grow, primary schools in the Liangshan
Mountains send students on a two-week holiday to dig up and sell
the bamboo shoots, despite the fact that the shoots are the most
nutritious food of the year for the giant panda.
"The students have to do it because they don't have the money to
pay for their textbooks and other school expenses," Wang said.
(China
Daily August 21, 2002)