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Spring 2008
Grad student finds pandas in China are elusive — wisdom is not
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Vanessa Hull shows off the collar she had hoped to use on a panda in China in order to study its habitat. |
Vanessa Hull, 25, a Ph.D. candidate, travelled to the snowy, remote mountains of the Sichuan Province of China this year – which also is the heart of panda habitat. She was hoping to capture, collar and track up to four wild pandas using advanced global positioning systems.
Hull, a student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in the MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, was among the first to obtain permits to trap the pandas and fit them with safe GPS collars. She and the team had planned to map where these elusive creatures go, effectively letting the pandas tell the researchers the habitat they like best.
Unfortunately, she didn’t catch a panda — this year.
Not for want of trying. Or dedication. Or expertise, support, or just plain gumption.
Rather, Hull went to the mountain and blogged her heart out for some 12 weeks to deliver perhaps the most valuable lesson: Science is hard.
But while she’s back in East Lansing now, her four GPS tracking collars still boxed up, she also returns with a tremendous amount of knowledge about how pandas do — and don’t — move across their habitat in the rural mountains of Sichuan Province in China.
 For the past dozen years, the MSU Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, led by Jianguo “Jack” Liu, painstakingly has gathered and crunched data on the pandas’ habitat, in collaboration with Professor Zhiyun Ouyang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Director Hemin Zhang at Wolong Nature Reserve, with support from the National Science Foundation, NASA, National Natural Science Foundation of China, and other sources.
The scientists have made groundbreaking discoveries on the give-and-take between panda and human survival in the bamboo jungles, mountains and farmland of the Wolong Nature Reserve, home of the famous panda research and breeding center.
She has inferred pandas — seeing signs of these rare and treasured animals. She’s wrestled to understand how climate affects their movements, in this case possibly foiling their trapping plans.
And she’s gained a richer understanding of the other animals that live in the Woolong Nature Reserve — and the people who live alongside them.
But the data she needs to finish her doctural dissertation — data that ideally would come wrapped in black and white fur — didn’t take the bait. So Vanessa will wait until next year, when she hopes to return.
Meanwhile the lessons, compelling and plentiful, can be found in her journals. MSU has asked her to contribute periodically as she continues her work throughout the year and update readers and continue to follow her on her journey.
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