Protecting Pandas

I've got a profile of ecologist Jianguo Liu in the latest Conservation Magazine:

When the Wolong Nature Reserve was established in Southwestern China in 1975, it was hailed as a landmark achievement of the environmental movement. The reserve, which covers more than 200,000 hectares, contains more than 10 percent of the wild giant panda population and has received extensive financial and logistical support from both the Chinese government and numerous environmental organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund. At first glance, the Wolong reserve would appear to be a model of a protected ecosystem, a perfect example of what it takes to save an endangered species.

Appearances, however, can be misleading. In the late 1990s, Jianguo Liu, a newly appointed professor of ecology at Michigan State University, began a detailed study of the reserve. He was interested in the Wolong area primarily because it had been so well supported. He assumed, like everybody else, that the reserve provided a safeguard for the giant pandas. "This is what reserves are supposed to do," Liu says. "That's why they say it's a protected area."

But Liu was wrong. After analyzing the data, he found that, in the 25 years following the establishment of the Wolong Nature Reserve, the most crucial parts of the forest canopy were being destroyed at an accelerated pace. This meant that the habitat inside the reserve was more vulnerable than the habitat outside. In other words, the protected area wasn't being protected; the reserve was making things worse.

The article is full of other contrarian conclusions, such as why population size doesn't really matter (but household size really does) or why divorce is so bad for the environment. Liu has done some recently interesting work at the intersection of economics, sociology and ecology.

Of course, no post on pandas would be complete without an adorable image: