Shennongjia Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey Research Team Safeguards Flagship Species

During this year’s golden snub-nosed monkey breeding season, six new infants were added to the troop at the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (Shennongjia) Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey Research Base in Dalongtan. Zheng Yongqi and Ying Shanshan, conducting research here, ascend the mountain daily to observe new developments within the monkey families and monitor every move of the newborns. “We need to give each infant a name, establish its file, and accumulate relevant data for researchers,” said Zheng Yongqi.

Zheng Yongqi and Ying Shanshan are second-year master’s students in forestry from Central South University of Forestry and Technology (CSUFT). Under a joint training agreement between the university and the Dalongtan Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey Field Research Base, they will complete their specialized project experiments and data collection at the Dalongtan base after finishing foundational coursework at their university. For them, “Dalongtan is a huge field laboratory.”

The golden snub-nosed monkey is a flagship species for global biodiversity conservation. Shennongjia and its surrounding areas represent the easternmost distribution of the Sichuan golden snub-nosed monkey and are the sole habitat of the Hubei subspecies (namely the Shennongjia golden snub-nosed monkey). To protect this rare species, Shennongjia has successively established research platforms including the Hubei Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey Protection Research Center, the Hubei Key Laboratory of Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey Conservation Biology in Shennongjia, and the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (Shennongjia) Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey Research Base.

The National Forestry and Grassland Administration (Shennongjia) Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey Research Base is the only national-level golden snub-nosed monkey research base approved by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration. Its main functions are to pool expertise from domestic and international primatologists, conduct research on golden snub-nosed monkey conservation, address bottlenecks in their protection, and provide a model for wildlife conservation research in China.

“In the past, the biggest bottleneck in wild golden snub-nosed monkey research was the difficulty in continuously, closely, and non-disruptively observing and recording individual and social group details,” explained Yao Hui, Deputy Director of the Science Research Institute of Shennongjia National Park. After years of effort, the base has overcome this challenge. Currently, over 100 monkeys belonging to 7 stable families live on the surrounding mountains, making the base the premier research site for golden snub-nosed monkey studies both in China and internationally.

To compensate for limited research resources, Shennongjia has developed the Dalongtan base into an open research platform. Besides CSUFT, the base has established cooperative relationships with over 30 universities and research institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Forestry University, and Huazhong Agricultural University. “We have successively set up 45 open research topics to meet the teaching and research needs of universities and research institutions,” Yao Hui stated. Over the 20 years since the Dalongtan base was established, more than 100 master’s and doctoral students have completed their specialized research projects there.

This collaborative approach has led to major breakthroughs in genetic diversity research at the Dalongtan base. Researchers have, for the first time, mapped the social structure characteristics of the Shennongjia golden snub-nosed monkeys and clarified their pedigrees, laying a solid foundation for scientific conservation. To date, the base has obtained six national invention patents covering technologies such as disease prevention and control, and artificial breeding; compiled six industry technical standards, providing standardized guidance for golden snub-nosed monkey protection; won five Hubei Provincial Science and Technology Progress Awards; and jointly published over 100 research papers with universities, of which more than 40 have been included in SCI-indexed journals, including top-tier journals like Science Advances. （Written by Du Hua and Wang Pin Translated by Qin Mengran）