Even though most of the coverage has been focused on the Wolong Center, Xinhua writer, Gong Yidong also reports that almost all of the 20 reserves for wild pandas at the Minshan Mountains in Sichuan were badly damaged in the quake, according to the Sichuan provincial forestry bureau.
China has 1,590 pandas living in the wild, 75 percent of them are in Sichuan, 17 percent in Shaanxi and 7 percent in Gansu. So lets try to get a perspective on all of this by making use of some maps that the World Wildlife Fund has put together. Be sure to click on the maps so you can see more clearly the information the WWF has provided.
First we have an overall map of China, showing key cities and their relationship to the pandas. The purple area shows provinces with some corridors enabling the pandas to move between areas that have separated them due to population growth, highways, industry and so on. The orange is the actual area that pandas live. I added Wolong to the map so you could see where it sits.
With this map we can get a closer look at the region. Here you can better see how small an area the pandas have been confined to and the mountain ranges they live in.
Now we can zoom in even more, in order to see the area of the Minshan mountains that were mentioned by the Sichuan Provincial Forestry Bureau.
Logging was a major industry in this region and through the help of the WWF, in trying to find alternative ways of utilizing the land, perhaps it will benefit the pandas in the long run.
You can also see with this map, what a major undertaking it is to provide the best corridors for the pandas.
The last map is of the Quinling Mountain area. It lies much further north of Manshan as you can see by the insert.
As you look over the maps, you will notice how the pandas habitat has been squeezed up into the mountain areas, especially here in Quinling.
When you see maps like these and try to visualize the mountains and ask the question... population? What population could they be talking about? Well, the city of Chengdu is the provincial capital of Sichuan and has significant cultural and historic importance to China. More about that some other time. Here are some photos of Chengdu, what looks to be a beautiful and modern city. These photos were found on the Cultural-China website.
