Geography Reference
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as well as the more obvious aspects of the physical and cultural
landscape, such as panda numbers and wildlife habitat, on the
one hand, and human numbers and conservation strategies, on
the other.
The giant panda is highly dependent on bamboo forest, which
forms its habitat and supplies the bamboo leaves that are its
staple food. As forests near the local households in Wolong
were depleted by the collection of fuelwood for cooking
and heating, fuelwood was increasingly collected from the
bamboo forest, leading to the deterioration of panda habitat
and threatening the panda with extinction. This led the
Chinese government to establish the reserve and take other
conservation measures to benefi t both pandas and humans.
Despite a reduction in the local resident human population
due to their out-migration to work in cities, the demand for
fuelwood increased, and panda habitat degraded faster after
the reserve was established than before. This was partly the
result of the consumption of local products by the large infl ux
of tourists arriving from around the world to see the pandas.
It was also affected by an unexpected increase in the number
of households, each of which received a substantial increase
in income from subsidies received as part of the conservation
strategy. Household proliferation more than counteracted
the reduced number of people per household, leading to an
increase in demand for fuelwood, which further threatened the
panda.
This example demonstrates that one type of integrated landscape
geography can yield results that are both interesting and useful.
It relates the spatial structure and underlying processes of the
natural and cultural landscape in a unifi ed way to the record of
human interventions and attempts to reshape the world. It also
goes some way towards capturing the essence of landscape and
the essence of geography.
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