Panda Paradise

Despite all this splendour, Wanglang is not immune to environmental threats – for example, climate change, natural disasters, natural bamboo flowering and die off, unsustainable harvesting of forest products (such as mushrooms) and historical overgrazing have impacted the panda habitat. In response, there have been 8 generations of reserve leaders here, over 70 years of uninterrupted conservation work.

It's no wonder that WWF and the Forestry and Grassland Bureau of Pingwu County have a long history of working together to protect giant panda habitat in and around Wanglang NNR. This work ranges from the very first collaboration to construct road access to the NR to support conservation efforts in 1996, to the inception of environmental nature education in China.

Giant panda conservation came to Li Xinrui’s life when he was just 14 years old when he attended talks organized at his school in the early days of WWF’s nature education work. Prior to this, Xinrui didn’t know much about the panda, but the talks ignited a passion in him. With 3 of his friends, he set out to learn more about these iconic bears, and even wrote an essay on panda rescue, winning a national award. The seed planted by this early interest led Xinrui to his career as a ranger.

In 2020, Xinrui became a fulltime ranger of Wanglang NNR. His main responsibilities include wildlife monitoring, patrolling and anti-poaching work, fire watch and supporting research. Today, he also continues the legacy of nature education work, sharing the wonder and importance of giant pandas and their habitat with local communities.

Spending around 2/3 of each month living in the Wanglang NNR ranger station, Xinrui’s work takes him to dizzying heights, trekking to the top of 5,000m peaks in the name of conservation. Walking tens of km a day through dense, wet forest, Xinrui and his team often work from sunrise to sunset. Ranger work is hard work.

During these impressive days of hard work, Xinrui and the Wanglang NNR team apply a suite of techniques to monitor giant pandas and their habitat. While the early days of panda monitoring involved techniques such as collaring and working with sniffer dogs to find the bears, approaches today aim to avoid disturbing pandas. From high-tech to low tech, the techniques employed by Xinrui and his team help us to understand the status of the panda population and their habitat, as well as inform ongoing conservation efforts.

• Camera traps: In 2004, Wanglang NNR became the first nature reserve in China to use camera traps for giant panda and wildlife monitoring. The cameras provide a unique insight into the bamboo forest.  
• Hair traps: With a simple brush strapped to a tree, rangers can collect DNA samples. As a panda walks past a tree or brushes themselves up against it to scratch and itch, they leave hairs behind. In a lab, these researchers can analyse the DNA to gain insight into the population and look at other data such as heavy metal poisoning to understand more about the threats the bears are facing.
• Bite size: Pandas have an incredibly powerful bite, allowing them to chomp their way through tough bamboo in one clean bite. Thanks to this powerful bite, the inefficiencies of their digestive system in breaking down bamboo, and each bear having a unique jaw width, rangers can measure something called ‘bite size’. The clear lengths of bamboo in panda poo provide this insight, helping to generate panda population estimates.
• Tree marking: Using a trained and keen eye, rangers like Xinrui can see where pandas have been scent marking trees with oils from their anal glands – a key component of communication and breeding behaviour, leaving behind information for potential panda suitors and competitors.
  Drones and remote sensing: Drones are now being used to monitor threats such as forest fires.  Analysis of historical and ongoing satellite data on forest cover is providing insight into the impact of climate change in giant panda habitat.
• Signs of panda friends: It’s also important to study other species sharing the giant panda’s home, such as takin and black bears. Recording prints, scratch marks, poo and more helps to build a picture of the overall health of the habitat and ecosystem.