Awareness

What can I do to help the pandas survive?

Reduce your consumption of material goods. Every purchase a person makes consumes natural resources. Buy responsibly. Choose products that do not have excessive packaging. Don't buy things you don't really need. Buy used products whenever possible. Reduced human consumption helps animals all over the world.

Reuse property-meaning; do not move to areas that have virgin property that is decimated for a new home. Buy existing apartments and remodel them.

Buy organic foods. Herbicides and pesticides harm wildlife and humans, and once in the food chain and water cycle travel all over the world.

Share your knowledge of threats to wildlife with family, friends and colleagues.

Do not buy products made from wild animal parts.

Other conservation notes

The giant panda is among the more familiar symbols of species conservation. The protection of giant panda populations has been aided by the establishment of more and better-managed reserves in existing panda habitat located in six mountain ranges in western China. The existence of these protected areas for pandas also helps the other animals and plants in those reserves, including golden monkeys, red pandas, takin, golden pheasants and more. However, as mentioned above, these populations are becoming increasingly isolated from one another, leading to disrupted patterns of gene flow and diminished genetic variability.

The phylogenetic placement of the red and giant panda has been an evolutionary enigma. Now with advanced technology and molecular analysis, taxonomists are able to consistently place the red panda within the Procyonidae (with raccoons, coatimundi, etc.) radiation and confirm the inclusion of giant panda in the Ursidae (bears) lineage (Slattery, J.P. & O'Brien, S.J., 1995). Most websites still do not have this stated correctly.

Part of the red panda's range overlaps with that of the giant panda in China, so giant panda conservation programs provide some benefit to the red panda. While it has protected legal status over most of its range, these measures are not stringent enough or enforced sufficiently to provide real protection.

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