China's Giant Panda National Park has seen remarkable progress in its conservation of rare animals thanks to the multiple effective measures taken during the past one and a half years.
The park is located in the western region of China, spanning the Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces and covering a total area of 22,000 square kilometers. It is one of the first batch of national parks in China established with a view to protecting rare species by putting related nature reserves in the three provinces under a unified management structure.
Home to over 70 percent of China's wild giant pandas, the park is also a protected habitat for thousands of plants and animals.
In the park's protected areas in Sichuan Province, which make up more than 80 percent of the total area and house over 90 percent of the wild pandas living in the national park, more than 3,000 park rangers are working on 663 routes. They made more than 100,000 trips along the routes in 2022 alone. Such efforts have yielded noticeable achievements in promoting the quality of rare animals' habitats, according to the rangers.
"On the same route and at the same altitude, snow leopards used to be spotted only once a year in this area, but now we can capture the sights of them more than eight times a year. We now even collect more panda feces than before," said Pang Mingjian, one of the park rangers.
Apart from more frequent patrolling, staff in the Sichuan area of the park also took more targeted measures to strengthen ecological protection comprehensively.
"We have connected 176 scattered habitats and opened up an ecological corridor for giant pandas. We have also developed a plan to replace firewood with electricity to reduce local residents' consumption of forest resources. We strictly stick to the red line of ecological protection," said Li Weiren, a group leader of the Jiuzhaigou demonstration county for ecological civilization construction.
After the establishment of the Giant Panda National Park, 26.56 square kilometers of giant panda habitat, including the ecological corridor, have been restored in Sichuan, and wild animals are making more frequent appearances in the province.
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