Fang Wang

Jianguo Liu

Springer - Publisher Connector

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 Wang1,2* & Jianguo Liu1
1Center for System Integration and Sustainability, Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48823, USA;
2Center 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
benefits they provide is a global challenge. A major bar-
rier to achieve sustainable development goals is the lack of
sufficient 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 flows (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 specific interests (e.g. fire-
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
benefit 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 benefit 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 significant 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
(Pan et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2015).
To obtain such knowledge, an innovative framework,
telecoupling, is introduced to address central questions of
how natural and human systems interact (Liu et al., 2015).
The framework of telecoupling derived from the concept
of Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS), which
are closed systems consist of five components (Residents,
Policies, Forest, Wildlife and Contextual Factors, Figure 1,
Liu et al. 2016 book chapter 2). While CHANS provide
a standardized framework to describe closed systems, the
telecoupling framework considers all systems are open ones,
which enables researchers and decision-makers to measure
linkages between distant CHANS (Liu et al., 2015). The
telecoupling framework identified five major interrelated
components: Systems (sending, receiving and spillover
systems); Flows (move material, information, and energy
among systems); Agents (facilitate the flows); Causes (drive
the flows between systems); and Effects (result from the
flows, Liu et al. 2016 book chapter 2). To expand previous
concepts, the framework of telecoupling explicitly considers
feedbacks and interactions across different levels and scales,
which enable us to measure the complex linkages within
and between CHANS at different scales (Liu et al., 2015;
Liu et al., 2016).
Here we suggest using the telecoupling framework to fa-
cilitate integrated research and governance for conservation
planning. We use coupled systems in and outside the giant
panda nature reserve network in the QinlingMountains (here-
after referred to asQinling) as an example to demonstrate how
to conduct integrated system approach for conservation and
development purposes. A conceptual analytical schematic
(Figure 2) is provided to demonstrate how the telecoupling
framework works in Qinling.
To design a study within the coupled systems in Qinling, it
requires researchers to collect data for both natural and hu-
man systems following interdisciplinary perspectives. When
investigating the Local Resident subsystem in Qinling, re-
searchers should focus not only on ordinary characteristics
such as household size, age, and birth rate, but also need to
measure the critical activities that are directly related to for-
est quality and wildlife dynamics. For example, the intensive
farming and livestock production have negative impacts on
giant panda distribution, while the off-farm work may reduce
the local anthropogenic interference that finally contribute to
species dispersal (Pan et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2015). For
the Forest component, forest composition (e.g. primary or
secondary), structure (e.g., understory species), and quality
(e.g., continuous or fragmented) not only relate to conser-
vation policies (e.g. of state or provincial forestry depart-
ments), but also contribute to resident income (e.g. Grain to
Green compensation) and wildlife occurrence (e.g. existence
of bamboo, habitat connectivity).
Figure 1   Diagram illustrating systems integration of telecoupling framework at different organizational levels. At the system level, the telecoupling consists
of five major interrelated components: systems, agents, flows, causes and effects. At the component level within a CHANS, residents and policies belong to
the human subsystem, forest and wildlife belong to the natural subsystem, and contextual factors exist in the focal coupled system and other systems. At the
subcomponent level, interdisciplinary tools and techniques are required to fulfill the data demand.
2 Wang, F., et al.   Sci China Life Sci
Figure 2   Conceptual analytical schematic that aims at measuring the shared needs and conflicts between giant pandas and people. Giant pandas and people
may share positive (blue solid line) and negative (red solid line) associations with natural and socio-economic factors, and may have conflicts for certain factors
(e.g. firewood collection). There could be correlations (gray dash line) between factors. The telecoupling processes (black arrow) are interactions between
local and distant CHANS.
To move a step forward by measuring telecoupling pro-
cesses between Qinling and outside systems, researchers are
required to identify critical interactions and feedbacks across
spatial boundaries between different systems. For example,
Qinling sends clean water and forest products to Xi’an City,
another CHANS, and receive financial payment in return.
A more complicated case is tourism development. The
existence of giant pandas provides precious opportunities
for attracting tourists from other places. In 2015, Qinling
received more than 500,000 tourists from Xi’an and other
major cities. The fast tourism development significantly
increased the net income of local residents and tourism
companies, but also introduced disturbances to wildlife habi-
tat (e.g. via increased transportation of people and goods,
intensive human activities near giant panda habitat). In some
regions the boosting anthropogenic interferences caused
decrease in giant pandas distribution (Wang et al., 2014),
which may negatively affect the tourism industry in the long
run. By collecting information on the flows (e.g. number
of tourists, amount of money), causes (e.g. distribution of
scenery attractions), effects (e.g. increased financial income,
decreased giant panda habitat quality) between different
systems (e.g. Qinling, Xi’an City, and tourism agencies),
and linking such results with the knowledge of giant panda
habitat preference obtained at local scale, researchers could
quantitatively evaluate the risks and benefits of tourism
developments in Qinling. To summarize, the telecoupling
framework provides a powerful tool when decision-makers
need to meet human needs while sustaining ecosystems and
the benefits they provide.
The data collection and analysis for operationalizing the
telecoupling framework require the integration of interdisci-
plinary tools and techniques. For example, the data collection
will involve diverse survey techniques including: (i) in-per-
son interviews and surveys with households for the socioeco-
nomic data (e.g. grazing intensity, off-farmwork), (ii) remote
sensing for the forest information (e.g. forest composition)
and human activities (e.g. area of farmland), and (iii) field
survey techniques such as camera trapping and sign transect
surveys for wildlife data (e.g. panda distribution and activ-
ity pattern). For data analysis, traditional methods are still
applicable but need to highlight the interactions between key
components. Systems modeling is a widely used approach
for integrating a variety of data and relationships. For ex-
ample, agent-based models are an increasingly popular bot-
tom-up modeling approach that incorporates detailed infor-
mation about each object to understand emergent properties
(Liu et al., 2016). Network analysis provides another non-
parametric approach to understand more complex ecological
and socioeconomic dynamics.
To demonstrate how the telecoupling framework works in
Qinling, we provide a conceptual analytical schematic that
aims at measuring the shared needs and conflicts between
giant pandas and people (Figure 2). Network analysis pro-
vides a sound approach to link interdisciplinary modeling
tools (e.g. species resource selection functions and socio-eco-
nomic models). The telecoupling processes (e.g. tourism,
off-farm working opportunity) can be measured between lo-
cal and distant CHANS. To achieve sustainable conserva-
tion and development goals, positive interactions could lend
Wang, F., et al.   Sci China Life Sci    3
themselves to build strategies across sectors, while the ex-
istence of negative interactions will be subject to trade-offs.
Such information enables decision-makers to promote syner-
gies and minimize the trade-offs.
The critical demand to strive for global sustainability re-
quires a sound foundation for understanding the complex in-
teractions in coupled human and natural systems. Through
demonstrating the application of the integrated framework of
telecoupling to evaluate human-wildlife interactions for fu-
ture conservation planning in the Qinling Mountains, we be-
lieve that the framework as well as other integrated system
approaches have strong implications beyond giant panda con-
servation.
Compliance and ethics     The author(s) declare that they have no conflict
of interest.
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Conservation planning beyond giant pandas: the need for an innovative telecoupling framework

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