Abstract:Road construction has made it easier for human activity to greatly affect wildlife habitats and it has become the most urgent and essential issue for wildlife survival. Due to highway and railway construction, giant pandas have been isolated into 24 (33) separate populations and have disappeared in some areas. Responding to road disturbance by building corridors for wildlife migration allowing the expansion and connection of habitats along the road has become the most effective conservation measure. Previous corridor studies achieved a lot in determining its types, designing principles and procedures, but location was not studied. Due to the unscientific process of determining location, some "ecological roads" with wildlife corridors still do harm to wildlife. Scientific determination of location is the premise for the construction of a wildlife corridor which can function when located in the right place. Taking the case of the conservation corridor of the giant panda, our study focused on the indicators, method and procedure of site selection for the wildlife corridor. Based on previous studies on the indicators of wildlife corridors and the concept of crucial area in conservation biology, we proposed possible indicators for site selection of the giant panda corridor: habitat feature, topography, probability of vegetation transformation and construction cost feasibility. With the results of the habitat assessment, we employed Arcgis to analyze the habitat pattern, elevation, slope and vegetation according to the following procedure: the distance between suitable habitat on both sides of the road, topographic features of elevation and slope, and vegetation. We identified two ideal positions for a giant panda corridor along the Sichuan 306 provincial way of Yiziyakou. By testing with monitoring data and records, we found feces and trails in areas adjacent to our identified positions. It proves that the corridor selection position is feasible and reasonable. Our study found that the pattern of giant panda habitat had undergone great changes through the disturbance caused by the 306 provincial way in the study area, with a ten percent decline in the proportion of suitable habitat producing a 1.5 km wide isolated area without habitat along the road. It is shown to be necessary to build corridors for alleviating road impacts on these habitats. Our study also shows that habitat pattern is an important basis for corridor location and should focus on topographic factors, which cannot be transformed, among all the habitat factors. With differences in target species and protected animals, the indicators and threshold values of corridor location also need to be adjusted, enriched and optimized. We demonstrated a method and procedure for corridor location which can contribute further to the practical application of wildlife corridors using the theoretical research.