Pandas still live outside the reserves and governmental protection should be expanded to those areas, said Andrés Viña, a specialist with MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability who contributed to the study, in an e-mail.

Conducting the research as part of a 15-year study in Wolong Nature Reserve in southwestern China, where the largest nature reserves for giant pandas are located, researchers developed and tested various state-of-the-art methods to judge the habitats, said Jianguo Liu, a university distinguished professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife who contributed to the study, in an e-mail.

The effort later was expanded to many other areas and ultimately to the entire geographic range of the species, Liu said.

“For the past 15 years, our interdisciplinary and international team has been doing research on the complex interactions among panda habitat, people and policies,” he said. “The results have laid a good foundation for China to establish additional nature reserves, the government is currently planning to substantially expand the areas under conservation and to create corridors among nature (reserves).”

The proposed protected areas could help pandas in captivity be brought back into the wild to breed and live in a natural area, Viña said.

“Our results showed that there is still a significant amount of panda habitat outside the current nature reserve system,” Viña said. “In addition, because of the exceptional success of programs to breed giant pandas in captivity, there is an ever-increasing interest in reintroducing successfully bred individuals into the wild.”

About 40 percent of appropriate habitat for the panda species is within the current giant panda reserves, but the reserves tend to be small and isolated, Viña said.

Breeding the species in the wild could increase the animals’ chances of repopulation, helping to save them from possible extinction.

Using this research, governments and captivity centers can apply the results to building spaces that are appropriate in land area and geographic location, said Steve Pueppke, the associate vice president of MSU’s Research and Graduate Studies, in an e-mail.

“The study will allow the government of China to put the right land into reserves so that pandas can survive into the future,” Pueppke said. “The study means that pandas will have a much better future chance to survive in the wild.”