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China has made a 15-year plan to restore the habitat and increase the artificially-bred population of the giant pandas unique to the Qinling Mountains in northwestern province of Shaanxi, which have been confirmed as a new sub-species of giant pandas on the verge of extinction.

Giant pandas were first spotted in Qinling Mountains in 1964, a century after the discovery of pandas in Sichuan. Compared with giant pandas living in southwestern province of Sichuan, home to most China's pandas, Qinling pandas are more rare and endangered due to their smaller population, said Sun Chengqian, deputy director of the Shaanxi Provincial Forestry Department.

Currently, the number of Qinling Mountain pandas is approximately 300 as against more than 1,300 non-Qinling pandas living elsewhere in China.

By 2020 when all the projects of the plan complete, the population of the Qinling pandas are expected to increase to 400 and their habitat will be expanded to 500,000 hectares from more than 340,000 hectares currently, said Sun at the meeting on Qinling pandas protection held in Xi'an, the provincial capital of Shaanxi on Saturday.

According to the plan, Shaanxi will enlarge the area of the state-level natural reserves for giant pandas in the province from current 171,900 hectares to 300,970 hectares by 2010, which will protect more than 80 percent of the habitat of Qinling pandas.

The plan also includes evacuating local residents from panda's home and build bamboo corridors between the habitats of different panda groups in Qinling, which have been isolated after the original homeland were cut off to pieces by highways, tunnels or human residential areas, said Sun.

In addition, Shaanxi also plans to save the panda sub-species, whose number is only 17 percent of their congeners living in neighboring province of Sichuan, by building a giant panda research center and an artificial breeding base.

The base, which will be built at the Shaanxi Salvage and Breeding Research Center for Endangered Wild Animals in Zhouzhi County, contributes more to the research and breeding of giant pandas as well as to their training before their release into the wild, said Sun. A research group headed by Prof. Fang Shengguo of prestigious Zhejiang University in east China had spent nine years since 1996 to study the difference between the pandas living in Sichuan and the Qinling Mountains and it made a conclusion last year that two species of pandas have been separated geographically for 10,000 to 12,000 years. Compared with Sichuan pandas, Qinling Mountain pandas have smaller skeletons and larger cheek teeth. What's more, the Sichuan pandas have black spots on the chest and white hair on the belly while Qinling Mountain pandas have dark brown spots on the chest and brown hair on the belly, said Prof. Fang. "From their faces, the Qinling pandas look more like cats, while the Sichuan ones are more like bears," said the professor. "What's more, genetically speaking, the Qinling pandas are also different from those living in Sichuan due to different geographical and climatic conditions at their homes. And the Sichuan Panda more evolved after they moved to live in a larger place and the Qinling pandas keep more genetic features as their common ancestors," he said.

The discovery of the Qinling panda sub-species not only proves pandas have strong capability to adapt themselves to nature, but also enriches the bio-diversity of giant pandas, lightening a brighter future for the existence of the much-loved creatures, said Zhao Xuemin, deputy director of the State Forestry Administration at the meeting.

As their peers at other places in China, however, the Qinling pandas have long been threatened with habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, poaching and conflicts between conservation and unsustainable economic development.

Fortunately, the Shaanxi provincial government has reinforced measures to improve nature conservation, in particular the Grain to Green Project and Natural Forest Protection Project, which bans logging for natural forests for a decade and restore previously-logged forests, providing an opportunity to solve the threats to giant pandas.

The province has built 14 natural reserves for giant pandas, including four state-level ones, and five panda corridors since 1978, which effectively protected the habitat of the Qinling pandas.

Giant pandas, said to have been around during the time of dinosaurs, are cited as a "national gem" of China. About 1,590 giant pandas live in the wild, mostly in the high mountains the provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, and 160 live in captivity around the world.

(Xinhua News Agency June 11, 2006)