Panda Preservation
G E O W O R L D / J A N U A R Y 2 O 1 0 16 Imagery/LIDAR Special Issue Imag er y Applications T he Wolong Nature Reserve for Giant Pandas is a veritable beehive of activity these days, despite the dearth of tourists who would normally be filling the hotels and restaurants between visits to the world-famous breeding center and the forests that constitute the panda's natural habitat. Rather, the activity is all about rebuilding from the devastating earthquake of 2008. Road crews are moving huge boulders and mountains of debris from the recently upgraded highway that links Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan Province, with Tibet. Additional heavy equipment is busy demolish-ing the many structures deemed too severely damaged to be used again, including most of the tourist facilities. Still other machines are sifting construction materi-als from the bed of the Pitiao River that drains the reserve's majestic valleys (see Figure 1) to the Chengdu plains as well as pouring foundations for new buildings. Meanwhile, the reserve's 4,000 local residents are tending their fields of corn, potatoes and beans after a long year mostly spent living in tents and later in temporary housing made of prefabricated aluminum and foam panels (see Figure 2). A Beneficial Disaster? The disaster's silver lining from the standpoint of panda conservation is the opportunity to convince farm households to move off the hillsides and away from the forest, where the reserve's wild pandas for-age for bamboo. It's estimated that about 10 percent of the world's population of wild pandas make Wolong their home, and the Chinese government is deeply committed to protecting this iconic animal. Moving to the valley bottom will mean a drastic change for the farm families, and scientists from Michigan State University's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) intensified their longstanding effort to understand land use in the years prior to the earthquake. Fortunately, DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satel-lite was able to capture a near-nadir cloud-free image of the area less than six months before the disaster. Unlike the Center's staple imagery provided by NASA's MSS, TM, ETM+ and MODIS sensors, the QuickBird imagery can resolve features of individual farmsteads and other infrastructure, enabling the mapping of land use at finer scales than previously possible. This is important, because farmland in the valley bottoms, where farmers will be relocated, is in short supply. The government has offered to provide new multi-family housing near the river and highway. The expectation is that the hillside farmland would be planted to bamboo forest to recuperate long-lost panda habitat. What's less clear is the future of the landscape's non-cultivated portions, including widespread tree plantations and pasture lands. The tree plantations result from nationwide refores-tation efforts during the last three decades, following logging and land clearance over roughly three centu-ries of human occupation. The most recent plantings have been targeted at steeper land, and much of the cropland left by those who abandon their damaged farms will be planted to trees or bamboo to further stabilize slopes and potentially restore habitat. BY WILLIAM J. M C CONNELL, WEI LIU, MINGCHONG LIU AND ANDRÉS VIÑA Panda Preservation Remote Sensing Helps Counter Natural and Human Complications Figure 1. The Wolong Nature Reserve for Giant Pandas is located in the rugged mountains of Sichuan Province in southwest China.