Giant Panda

The Giant Panda National Park extends across the provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, in the mountains on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, and holds around 1,339 wild pandas, more than 70% of China's total population. Its purpose is not merely to protect the animals but to solve the problem that most threatens the species: fragmentation. Decades of roads, farmland, mines and settlements had broken its range into dozens of isolated populations, too small to be viable in the long term. The park brings the pre-existing reserves under a single designation and, above all, the ecological corridors that connect them.

The habitat is temperate montane forest, with bamboo thickets beneath a canopy of conifers and broadleaves, across a very marked altitudinal gradient. Protecting the bamboo and the forest the panda needs benefits a whole train of species that share its territory and are equally threatened: the red panda, the golden snub-nosed monkey, the takin, the clouded leopard, Temminck's tragopan and a mountain flora of enormous richness. That is why the panda works as an umbrella species for one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in Asia.

The park forms part of the first group of five Chinese national parks officially established on 12 October 2021, although the project began as a pilot in 2018.