Found only in China, one of the world's fastest growing and most populated regions, the giant panda clings to survival. The panda is endangered for the same fundamental reason that nature is imperiled throughout China, and indeed throughout the world: Explosive population growth and unsustainable use of natural resources are causing habitat for wildlife to vanish. Compounding these unrelenting pressures are a host of other impediments to giant panda conservation in China, such as inadequate scientific data, chronic funding shortages, low capacity to produce a well-trained conservation workforce, and a clash between nature conservation and economic development.

These are formidable hurdles, but promising developments in the last few years are grounds for guarded optimism. Although more improvements are needed, China has made encouraging progress in its conservation policies and actions. Innovative strategies are emerging for safeguarding giant pandas and their habitat while maintaining the livelihoods of local people. China is a crowded country developing at a blinding pace. This is the unalterable backdrop against which pragmatic conservation approaches must be developed. Striking a lasting balance between nature conservation and economic development is the key to the giant panda's future.

Physical Characteristics
Pandas are robust, bear-like animals with a distinctive black and white coat. They have a head and body length of 120 to 150 cm, and weigh between 85 and 110 kg. Specialized physical features include broad, flat molars, modified for crushing, and an enlarged wrist bone functioning as an opposable thumb - both adaptations for eating bamboo stems.

Population & Distribution
Fossil evidence has demonstrated that the giant panda was once widespread in southern and eastern China and in neighboring Myanmar and North Vietnam. Today however, according to the last panda census in the mid-1980's, there may be as few as 1,000 giant pandas occupying about 13,000 km² of habitat scattered across six mountain ranges in southwestern China. This diminishing range first occurred through climatic change, but in recent centuries this decline has been caused by increased human settlement. The species is now restricted to six isolated mountain ranges in the Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces along the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The remaining area of suitable panda habitat totals about 29,500 km². Because most valleys are inhabited by people, many panda populations are isolated in narrow belts of bamboo, no more than 1,000-1,200 m in width. Panda habitat is continuing to disappear as settlers push higher up the mountain slopes.

Panda habitat falls within the Temperate Forests of Central China (the bamboo forest zone) between 1,100 m and 3,300 m, exceptionally as high as 4,000 m. Human cultivation and settlement determine the lower altitude limit. These temperate forests are one of the most biologically rich temperate areas on earth and one of WWF's priority ecoregions within the Global 200.

The panda roams around in a well-defined home range of between 3.9 and 12 km². Though it was once believed that pandas lived a relatively solitary existence, new research from Shaanxi Province's Qinling Mountains now presents a different scenario. Far from living alone, it claims that pandas in Qinling live and travel in groups of at least two, and sometimes in groups of up to 28.

Learn More from World Wildlife Fund:
  Diet
  Reproduction
  Status and Threats
  Pandas and Zoos
  WWF Program History
  Current Challenges
  What is WWF Doing?
  Future Outlook
  Conservation History