SCIENCE CHINA Life Sciences Special Topic: Cases of wildlife conservation in China: successes and challenges • INSIGHT • doi: 10.1007/s11427-016-0349-0 Conservation planning beyond giant pandas: the need for an innovative telecoupling framework Fang Wang 1,2* & Jianguo Liu 1 1 Center for System Integration and Sustainability, Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48823, USA; 2 Center for Nature and Society, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China Received September 20, 2016; accepted October 19, 2016; published online December 21, 2016 Citation: Wang, F., and Liu, J. Conservation planning beyond giant pandas: the need for an innovative telecoupling framework. Sci China Life Sci. doi: 10.1007/s11427-016-0349-0 Meeting human needs while sustaining ecosystems and the benefts they provide is a global challenge. A major bar- rier to achieve sustainable development goals is the lack of suffcient knowledge on the complex relationships between humans and nature (Loucks et al., 2001; Liu et al., 2007). Different parts of the world have never been as closely con- nected through all means of fows (e.g. information, labor, goods and products) as today. Such intensive interactions not only affect human systems, but also change natural systems (Leslie et al., 2015). However, these interactions and feed- backs were largely downplayed or ignored in conservation practices. Though the idea of developing conservation plans that involve local communities and related stakeholders has been advocated for decades, most practices were conducted at the local scale but ignoring the interactions between distant systems, and/or focused on few specifc interests (e.g. fre- wood consumption, tourism, and etc.). Given this inadequate consideration of the critical interactions between human and natural systems, it is quite often that the practical applications beneft one or few targeting species but fail to support human needs, which may compromise conservation in the long run. Thus, it is critical to develop innovative systems approaches that improve human wellbeing while sustaining wildlife pop- ulations and their habitats. *Corresponding author (email: wangfang.vic@gmail.com) The development and conservation efforts in and outside giant panda nature reserves, a network consists of 67 pro- tected areas across southwestern China, are perfect examples that local and national policies should beneft both conserva- tion and society (Loucks et al., 2001). From the perspective of giant pandas, the species have been widespread throughout southern China and coexisted with human for thousands of years (Kong et al., 2016). This might have resulted from the traditional small-scale farming methods that have maintained extensive areas of high nature value in nearby mountainous areas (Pan et al., 2014). While the historical giant panda dis- tribution might be a successful example of wildlife-human co-existence, the rapid developments were likely to under- lie recent signifcant giant panda population declines in the past decades (Lu et al., 2001; State Forestry Administration, 2006). With the huge efforts on forest restoration and na- ture reserve establishment, now the wild giant panda popu- lation has recovered with a 16.8% population increase since 2003 (State Forestry Administration, 2015). From the human perspective, giant pandas and other natural resources are not just objects of admiration, but the essential elements that pro- vide products, services, or land to meet the increasing liveli- hood needs for millions of people (Liu et al., 2016). As a result, the knowledge on the degree and direction how the natural and human systems interact with each other will pro- vide critical information to help decision-makers to meet the long-term sustainable goals for both giant pandas and people © Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016 life.scichina.com link.springer.com Downloaded to IP: 35.10.127.76 On: 2016-12-23 05:15:09 http://engine.scichina.com/doi/10.1007/s11427-016-0349-0