Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Habitat Ecological Intactness and Responses of Wild Giant Panda Populations in Sichuan, China

Habitat degradation caused by anthropogenic disturbance is a major threat to global biodiversity, yet the spatiotemporal dynamics of the ecological intactness of giant panda habitat and the associated population responses remain poorly quantified. We focused on the Sichuan section of the Giant Panda National Park and the Liangshan Mountains. Using multi-source anthropogenic disturbance data and three national giant panda surveys, we integrated fuzzy overlay analysis, Theil–Sen trend analysis, Geodetector, and the Mann–Whitney U test to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics, contributing disturbance components, and population responses of habitat intactness. The mean habitat intactness in 2020 was 6.70. Intactness declined slowly during 1980–2020, and 73.7% of the habitat remained stable. Among the disturbance components of the intactness index, land-use type and road construction contributed most to its spatial variation, and the joint contribution of any two interacting components exceeded that of either component alone. The intactness of giant panda occurrence sites was higher than that of systematic background points (significant in five of the six survey-by-region comparisons) and was higher in the Liangshan Mountains than in the national park. However, intactness was not significantly correlated with population density. These results indicate that wild giant pandas are concentrated in high-intactness habitat, although intactness alone does not predict population density, and they provide empirical evidence for intactness-oriented conservation management.