Species profile
Ailuropoda melanoleuca
Giant panda
This is a curated published estimate, not a live census. Estimates may refer to mature individuals, wild individuals or a documented range and are not directly comparable between species.
VU · Vulnerable — Vulnerable — high risk of extinction in the wild
About this species
Giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) is part of the curated SpeciesWatch catalogue and is classified as Vulnerable. A giant panda spends up to 14 hours a day eating bamboo — 12 to 38 kg of it — because its carnivore-style digestive system extracts very little energy from plants. Its recorded population direction is increasing. That is encouraging, but it does not remove continuing pressures or make every population secure.
Habitat, behaviour and ecological role
This profile associates the species with terrestrial, forest. These labels summarise environments used during different stages of its life rather than drawing an exact range boundary. Newborn pandas weigh barely 100 grams, about 1/900th of their mother's weight — among the tiniest babies relative to body size of any placental mammal. Its anatomy and behaviour are responses to those environments, while movement can connect distant places requiring different forms of management.
Why this species is at risk
Despite its bamboo diet, the panda is a bear with the digestive tract of a carnivore — and it still occasionally eats small animals or carrion. The catalogue records 3 principal pressures for this profile: Habitat fragmentation, Low genetic diversity, Bamboo die-off. They should not be treated as isolated causes. Habitat change, exploitation, pollution, disease and climate stress can reinforce one another, while the importance of each pressure varies between regions and through time.
Conservation outlook
Protecting and reconnecting habitat is a priority, together with infrastructure planning that keeps feeding, breeding or migration routes functional. Biosecurity, health surveillance and careful management of small populations help contain risks that can spread rapidly. Actions need long-term monitoring and revision as evidence changes; a positive intervention in one place does not by itself represent recovery across the species.
Editorial review: 2026-08-21
Threat factors
Known occurrences
Dots are georeferenced occurrence records from OBIS (marine) and GBIF (global), not individual animals and not a complete range map. Up to 500 recent API results are cached; the profile renders at most 500 points.
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