Giant pandas in the wild are more fragmented and isolated than they were 30 years ago and many continue to face a high risk of extinction despite recent gains in their overall numbers, a new study finds.

Climate change, habitat loss, and reduced breeding viability—an inherent risk in small, remote populations where potential mates are few—could pose a triple whammy for these animals, the research suggests.

Scientists need to find ways to restore connectivity between these populations or introduce new breeding animals into them, the study’s authors say.

“Our models show that populations with fewer than 30 individuals have, under a best-case scenario, a one in five chance of going extinct in 100 years on average. Some may not be that lucky,” says Stuart Pimm, professor of conservation ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, who helped design the new study.

As climate change intensifies in coming years, pandas will be driven higher and deeper into China’s mountains in search of their dietary staple, bamboo, and their populations will become even more fragmented and vulnerable to extinction, the models predict.

This vulnerability will be heightened by the synchronistic mass flowering, and subsequent mass deaths, of bamboos across large parts of the pandas’ range—an episodic event that, historically, occurs every 65 to 120 years. The next flowering in China is due to occur in the coming decade or two, Pimm says.

Read the full article about the high extinction risk for giant pandas by Tim Lucas at Futurity.