Wild Giant Pandas Devastated by Quake
source: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/27/panda-earthquake.html
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http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/27/panda-earthquake.html
"More than 60 percent of the wild giant panda population in China's Sichuan province was affected by the powerful quake that rocked the region and killed thousands in May 2008, a study said Monday.Ecologists also found that the massive 8.0-magnitude earthquake, which triggered huge landslides across the region's mountainous terrain and left nearly 87,000 people dead or missing, destroyed nearly a quarter of panda habitat close to the tremor's epicenter.
"It is probable that habitat fragmentation has separated the giant panda population inhabiting this region, which could be as low as 35 individuals," said Weihua Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the lead author of the study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
"This kind of isolation increases their risk of extinction in the wild, due in part to a higher likelihood of inbreeding."
