China has made a 15-year plan to restore the habitat and increase the artificially bred population of the giant pandas unique to the Qinling Mountains in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, which have been confirmed as a new sub-species of giant pandas on the verge of extinction.

Giant pandas were first spotted in Qinling Mountains in 1964, a century after the discovery of pandas in southwestern Sichuan Province. Compared with giant pandas living in Sichuan, home to most of China's pandas, Qinling pandas are more rare and more endangered due to their smaller population, said Sun Chengqian, deputy director of the Shaanxi Provincial Forestry Department.

Currently, the number of Qinling pandas is approximately 300 compared with more than 1,300 non-Qinling pandas living elsewhere in China.

By 2020 when all the projects of the plan complete, the population of the Qinling pandas is expected to increase to 400 and their habitat will be expanded to 500,000 hectares from more than 340,000 hectares currently, said Sun.

According to the plan, Shaanxi will enlarge the area of the state-level natural reserves for giant pandas in the province from the current 171,900 hectares to 300,970 hectares by 2010, which will protect more than 80 percent of the habitat of the Qinling pandas.

The plan also includes evacuating local residents from the panda's home and building bamboo corridors between the habitats of the different panda groups in Qinling, which have been isolated after their original homelands were dissected by highways, tunnels or human residential areas, said Sun.

In addition, Shaanxi also plans to save the panda sub-species, whose number is only 17 percent of their cousins living in neighboring Sichuan, by building a giant panda research center and an artificial breeding base.

The base, which will be built at the Shaanxi Salvage and Breeding Research Center for Endangered Wild Animals in Zhouzhi County, contributes more to the research and breeding of giant pandas as well as to their training before their release into the wild, said Sun.

A research group headed by Professor Fang Shengguo of the prestigious Zhejiang University spent the last nine years studying the difference between the pandas living in Sichuan and those living in the Qinling Mountains and he concluded last year that the two species of pandas have been separated geographically for 10,000 to 12,000 years.

Compared with their Sichuan counterparts, Qinling pandas have smaller skeletons and larger cheek teeth. What's more, the Sichuan pandas have black spots on the chest and white hair on the belly while Qinling pandas have dark brown spots on the chest and brown hair on the belly, said Fang.

"From their faces, the Qinling pandas look more like cats, while the Sichuan ones are more like bears," said the professor. "What's more, genetically speaking, the Qinling pandas are also different from those living in Sichuan due to the different geographical and climatic conditions of their homes."

The discovery of the Qinling sub-species not only proves pandas have a strong capability to adapt themselves to nature, but it also enriches the bio-diversity of giant pandas, signaling a brighter future for the existence of these much-loved creatures, said Zhao Xuemin, deputy director of the State Forestry Administration.

As with their peers in other places in China, however, the Qinling pandas have long been threatened with habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, poaching and conflicts between conservation and unsustainable economic development.

Fortunately, the Shaanxi Government has reinforced measures to improve nature conservation, in particular the "Grain to Green Project" and "Natural Forest Protection Project," which bans the logging of natural forests and restores previously-logged forests, providing an opportunity to solve the threats to giant pandas.

The province has built 14 natural reserves for giant pandas, including four state-level ones, and five panda corridors since 1978, which effectively protect the habitat of the Qinling pandas.

Giant pandas, said to have been around during the time of dinosaurs, are cited as a "national gem" of China. About 1,590 giant pandas live in the wild, mostly in the high mountains of the provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu with 160 living in captivity around the world.