After numerous attempts, Zhao Jianhua - a worker at the Wanglang National Nature Reserve, north of the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu - finally built a small fire and sat down.

He opened his wallet, took out a photo of his two-year-old son and looked closely.

"I didn't know if I could survive the night," he recalled, his eyes glistening with tears.

One night in May 2000, darkness had fallen. Zhao and his local guide had reached the deep gully in the Liangshan Mountains after some 10 hours of trekking, sometimes in rain and hailstones.

And then they lost their way.

The gully was Zhao's destination for the day's field work. It is part of the Dafengding Nature Reserve in Mabian County, some 220 kilometers south of Chengdu.

Zhao and 81 other members of the Sichuan provincial team started field work for the Sichuan section of the third national survey of giant pandas in the wild in May 2000.

The national survey covered the giant-panda habitats that now exist only in three provinces - Sichuan, Northwest China's Gansu bordering Sichuan to the north, and Shaanxi.

The survey in Sichuan was the most important since about 81.4 percent of giant pandas live in Sichuan. About 83.7 percent of China's giant-panda habitats are located in the province, in one of the three biggest forests in China.

Scientific Methods

Zhao and other field workers had undergone extensive training. The team members included researchers with doctorates and master's degrees in life sciences, forestry and natural resources. They mainly comprised experts from the Sichuan Provincial Forestry Academy and staff from national, provincial and county-level nature reserves in Sichuan.

Wang Hongjia - then deputy director of the Sichuan provincial panda survey team and now director of the Sichuan Provincial Station for the Survey, Protection and Management of Wildlife Resources - said: "Comprehensive scientific and technological preparation has been the hallmark of the third national panda survey in Sichuan."

One of the technical architects of the survey was Wang Hao, a lecturer at Peking University, whose doctoral dissertation expounded in detail the survey methodology, habitat utilization and population viability analysis in the study of giant-panda conservation.

"Obtaining a more accurate population size of the giant panda - the symbol of wildlife conservation - is one of the steps towards designing a conservation policy, strategy and ways of management," he said.

Wang Hao served as a member of the technical expert consulting team for the Sichuan part of the survey.

The survey methodology designed by Wang Hao integrated the research results achieved by many scientists over the years, including the survey methods used in the first two national surveys.

"I was trying to expand on the previous methods and offer a more scientific quantitative analysis," he said.

Wang Hao also got more scientific data from the research results that Professor Pan Wenshi and his students from Peking University accumulated in more than a decade of field studies on giant pandas and their habitats in the Qinling Mountains in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province.

As one of Pan's students, Wang Hao spent much of his time as a postgraduate student working in the Qinling Mountains.

Helped by donations from the Worldwide Fund for Nature (known as the World Wildlife Fund in the United States and Canada), Wang Hao co-operated with Professor Liu Shaoying and his associates and students from Sichuan Provincial Forestry Academy to try to flesh out the methodology at the Wanglang Nature Reserve in Pingwu County in northern Sichuan. Liu and his associates and students also took part in the field work between 2000 and 2001.

Wang's methodology became the standard method for the third national giant-panda survey.

When Zhao Jianhua and the rest of his team were being trained, they learned how to identify bamboo stem fragments and droppings left by giant pandas. Renowned panda scholars Hu Jinchu of Nanchong Teachers' College and George Schaller of the United States researched giant pandas in Wolong, also in Sichuan Province. They discovered a way to classify giant pandas into three age groups according to the length of the bamboo stem fragments they left behind.

They also learned to use an altimeter, a compass, cameras and a Global Positioning System device little bigger than a television remote control. They used the GPS device to determine the longitude and latitude of the location where they saw wild pandas or found panda footprints or droppings or bamboo stem fragments left by the pandas.

During the training sessions, they also learned how to fill in extensive survey sheets and note down the different families of plants and other wild animals they spotted, among other information.

An important part of the team's job was to conduct socio-economic surveys in communities neighboring the panda habitats and reserves. They would gather first-hand information on the lives of the local people, whose ways of life and attitudes constitute an important factor in the protection of the wildlife and ecosystem.

All the data Zhao and other field workers collected during the 20 months of the survey, which ended last December, have been fed into computers using geographic information systems (GIS) technology and specially designed software.

The information is still being processed and analyzed, according to Wang Hongjia.

Initial survey results have shown that the Wolong National Nature Reserve still has the largest number of giant pandas. The reserve covers 2,000 square kilometres and is located mainly in the Qionglai Mountains.

While Zhao Jianhua and other field workers received extensive technical training, Wang Hongjia, Wang Hao and other experts mapped out the localities to be surveyed. In the end, the survey areas covered 184 townships and 27 giant-panda reserves under the jurisdiction of 38 counties or seven prefectural level cities and three ethnic-minority autonomous prefectures.

Wang Hongjia said: "The national ban on the logging of natural woods and the project to return hilly land back to woodland enabled us to expand the survey area compared with the second national survey."

Covering 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres), the survey areas in Sichuan lie in the province's five major mountain ranges - the Daxiangling, Liangshan, Minshan, Qionglai and Xiaoxiangling mountains.

There were 6,898 actual routes - mainly deep mountain gullies that Zhao Jianhua and other field workers had to trek.

When field work started, experts as well as field workers soon discovered that the arduous work tested not only their physical ability but also their tenacity and courage, as they were often the first people to venture into some of the deep gullies.

Lei Kaiming, a team member from the Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve, said: "Don't ask me how many gullies I went into. I simply lost count."

The deep mountain ravines were often treacherous.

After Zhao Jianhua and his local guide lost their way in the Dafengding Nature Reserve in the Liangshan Mountains, they stopped at a hillside to wait for other team members.

At 11 pm, they heard the others calling. But Zhao's local guide, of the Yi ethnic minority, forbade Zhao to answer their calls for fear that he might wake the mountain ghost, according to a Yi ethnic tradition.

In the end, Zhao and the guide had to spend the night in the open. Snow fell in the small hours. "Other team members found us early the next morning," Zhao said.

But Wang Hongjia said Zhao's experience was not unique.

Quite a number of team members had to wade through ice-cold water and spend the night in remote valleys during the survey. They often had to follow narrow trails opened up by takins, large goat-antelopes also under State protection.

Huang Xiaofu, who was 23 when he joined the team, fell off a 20-metre-high cliff. A tiny part of his skull is now covered with a small alloy sheet, said Wang Hongjia.

Harvesting Rewards

Wang Hongjia and other team members said that their hard work on the national survey also reaped huge rewards.

Zhao Jianhua said: "By looking at the thickness and shades of the forests and the growth of the bamboo, I'd know if the patch was frequented by the giant pandas."

Lei Kaiming said he could not forget the moment when he spotted a giant panda running in what is called Xihuo Gully deep in the Wolong National Nature Reserve.

"The giant panda disappeared from my sight when I took out my camera," he said with regret.

Many of the survey team members interviewed said they learned a great deal not only about giant pandas but also about nature as a whole, the importance of maintaining biodiversity, the existing ecosystem and the harmony between man and nature.

"The virgin forests I have seen during the survey maintain thick humus carpets from the litter of half-decayed leaves, twigs and logs. This conserves the moisture and water in the soil," said Zhao Jianhua, who had a secondary technical education. "But the hills that have undergone heavy logging could retain only very little water and do little to prevent soil erosion."

Zhao Lianjun, now 28 and also from the Wanglang National Nature Reserve, graduated from a secondary technical school after studying nature-reserve management. Now proficient in computer data processing, Zhao has risen to become one of the team's leading computer technicians.

Wang Hongjia said that the national survey has helped train a large number of knowledgeable nature-reserve workers, who will be instrumental in promoting the ideas of environmental and nature-reserve protection and sustainable development and in nature-reserve management.

Above all, Wang Hongjia and his colleagues have ascertained the giant-panda habitats and the actual spread of the giant pandas in Sichuan. They have learned the distribution of the bamboo species that the giant panda eats and of the other animals that share the panda's habitat.

They also gathered information on the effect of human activity upon giant-panda habitats and on the conflicts between local rural communities and giant-panda reserves.

"All these data provide us with a scientific basis to monitor the giant pandas and their habitats and will help us to work out effective protection policies and a long-term management plan," Wang Hongjia said.

"We will not only protect the existing panda habitats but also take care of the areas that could potentially become homes of the giant panda," he said.

What worries Wang Hongjia most is how to reconcile nature conservation with economic development.

He noted that the communities neighboring most of the giant-panda reserves are plagued with poverty.

In spring, when bamboo shoots grow, primary schools in the Liangshan Mountains send students on a two-week holiday to dig up and sell the bamboo shoots, despite the fact that the shoots are the most nutritious food of the year for the giant panda.

"The students have to do it because they don't have the money to pay for their textbooks and other school expenses," Wang said.

(China Daily August 21, 2002)