Tracking endangered giant pandas through the Wolong Nature Reserve — the heart of China’s panda conservation efforts — might seem like a biologist’s dream job. But after five years counting mounds of panda scat — and just one 10-minute glimpse of the elusive bears — researcher Scott Bearer was ready for a change. “It’s not nearly as glamorous as you might think,” he says.

Bearer, who now works for The Nature Conservancy in Pennsylvania, used the samples to benchmark the pandas’ activity in different forest types, with the idea of figuring out whether forest restoration can help save the species. 

Prior studies were not hopeful, as they indicated that pandas avoided areas that had been logged. But as Bearer’s research progressed, he found nearly as much panda scat in the once-logged forests as in the virgin forests.

To solve this puzzle, Bearer created a statistical model to parse how factors such as forest age, vegetation cover and landscape topography influenced panda activity in the 2,000-square-kilometer forest preserve. He discovered that the areas loggers targeted more than 30 years ago were the same ones pandas now favored: shallow slopes and ridge tops. The last virgin forests remain on steep inclines, which—for the sluggish pandas — take too much energy to clamber up.

It turns out that giant pandas will return to restored forests, just not restored forests on steep hillsides. Bearer and his team published their results in the journal Biological Conservation.

“They proved something that we’ve seen anecdotally,” says Karen Baragona, a biologist who manages WWF’s Panda Program. She says Bearer’s results show that logged-over forests can provide suitable habitat.

Now that Bearer has returned to his home state of Pennsylvania, he’s using the same techniques he employed in China to help local landowners restore their forests. He has created a modeling tool that helps the Conservancy’s outreach foresters, including Mike Eckley in Williamsport, give landowners tailored prescriptions, such as mowing down mountain laurel shrubs to shed sunlight on oak seedlings. “It’s going to help landowners put the pieces of the puzzle together,” says Eckley.  

—Brendan Borrell

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Nature picture credits: Photo © Mitsuaki Iwago/Minden Pictures