Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Class: Mammalia

Order: Carnivora

Family: Ursidae

Genus: Ailuropoda

Species: A. melanoleuca

A large majority of giant pandas call the southwest mountains of China home. Giant pandas like to live in wet cooler areas where average rainfall is around 40 inches of rain and a temperature between 60-64 degrees fahrenheit. The southwest china is home to over 230 mammal species including the red panda and monkeys it's also home to over 600 bird species, 90 reptile species along with 90 species of amphibians and freshwater fish. The mountains are home to over 3,500 species of plants including bamboo the main food source for giant pandas.   

Giant pandas or only found in China and mainly southwest China. They are found in zoos all over the world. 

The giant panda's diet is primarily herbivorous, consisting almost exclusively of bamboo. Pandas eat any of 25 bamboo species in the wild. The average giant panda eats as much as 20 to 30 lb of bamboo shoots a day to compensate for the limited energy content of its diet. Their diet can include eggs, small animals and carrion. Pandas are also known to forage in farmland for pumpkin, kidney beans, wheat and domestic pig food. 

Adult giant pandas may be generally solitary, but they do communicate periodically through scent marks, calls and occasional meetings. Recent research has also found that giant pandas may form communities of seven to 15 individuals within the local population.

These individuals occupy a "group" territory, within which male home ranges overlap almost completely, while female home ranges overlap far less. Members of different "groups" generally avoid socializing with each other. 

Calls and scents draw males and females to each other. Female giant pandas give birth from 90 to 180 days after mating. Although females may give birth to two young, usually only one survives. Giant panda cubs may stay with their mothers for up to three years before striking out on their own. In a lifetime, a giant panda may successfully raise only five to eight cubs. In a lifetime, a giant panda may successfully raise only five to eight cubs. 

When the cub is first born, it is pink, blind, and toothless. One to two weeks after birth, the cub's skin turns grey where its hair will eventually become black.A month after birth, the colour pattern of the cub's fur is fully developed. Its fur is very soft and coarsens with age. The cub begins to crawl at 75 to 80 days. Giant pandas reach breeding maturity between 4 and 8 years of age. 

A newborn cub weighs 3-5 ounces. Pink, hairless, and blind, the cub is 1/900th the size of its mother. Cubs do not open their eyes until they are 6-8 weeks old and are not mobile until they are 3 months old. 

Although adult giant pandas have few natural predators other than humans, young cubs are vulnerable to attacks by snow leopards, yellow-throated martens, eagles, feral dogs, and the Asian black bear. The majority of wild pandas die from trauma and malnutrition another major contributor's is disease such as sunstroke and ileus 

In the Qinling Mountains, black bears , golden takins , and wild boars are the main food competitors of giant pandas by eating bamboo shoots, which is an important energy source for nutritional recovery of giant pandas after the winter season. Giant pandas were historically hunted using dogs and are currently threatened by free-roaming dogs and their associated diseases. The global dog population is estimated to exceed 700 million, making dogs the most abundant carnivore worldwide.

Giant pandas are currently considered vulnerable with a rating of 3.1.  the Fourth National Giant Panda Survey, showing that the population of wild giant pandas had increased by 268 to 1864 over the last decade.  The current population is around 1864 wild pandas and anther 600 in zoos. 

The West first learned of the giant panda on 11 March 1869, when the French missionary Armand David received a skin from a hunter.  Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., became the first Westerners to shoot a panda, on an expedition funded by the Field Museum of Natural History in the 1920s.  The giant panda is a vulnerable species, threatened by continued habitat loss and habitat fragmentation. The giant panda has been a target of poaching by locals since ancient times and by foreigners since it was introduced to the West.  In 2020,  Establishing the new protected area in the Sichuan Province also gives various other endangered or threatened species, like the Siberian tiger, snow leopard, the golden snub-nosed monkey, the red panda and the complex-toothed flying squirrel. The possibility to improve their living conditions by offering them a habitat. 

Gifts of giant pandas to American and Japanese zoos formed an important part of the diplomacy of the People's Republic of China in the 1970s, as it marked some of the first cultural exchanges between China and the West. This practice has been termed "panda diplomacy". By 1984, however, pandas were no longer given as gifts. Instead, China began to offer pandas to other nations only on 10-year loans, for a fee of up to US$1,000,000 per year and a any cubs born during the loan are the property of China.  

Microbes in panda waste are being investigated for their use in creating biofuels from bamboo and other plant materials.