Exciting news to share with everyone! We’re headed back to China in September to resume work and collaboration with the CCRCGP on all of our projects! The CCRCGP has approved our permits and reinstated all of our old Memorandums of Understanding (contracts that we put together for international collaboration).

That means we have a super short deadline to get everything in place and hire interns!! For the fall we are concentrating on restarting our project on evaluating reintroduction candidates for behavioral competency and testing personalities. Certain personality profiles, such as “boldness”, have been shown to predict likelihood of survival or dispersal from a release site (Pinter-Wollman 2009; Bremner-Harrison et al. 2013). Our study aims to classify personality and behavioral competency in giant pandas slated for release from ages 6 – 24 months and correlate profiles with post-release survival and success.

I hope we can get interns on the ground in time! Please share widely with anyone you think would be interested. If we don’t find appropriate candidates we’ll focus on planning for breeding season!

We have a very short window to prepare but are excited to be back on the ground and moving forward with our projects . . . and, of course, visiting with all the beautiful bears – we’ve been missing our favorites!

Meghan Martin is the Director and Primary Research Scientist of PDXWildlife. She is a postdoctoral researcher for San Diego Zoo Global and focuses on optimizing breeding success of conservation breeding programs.