NIR helping giant panda conservation
Submitted by ianm on 22 November 2012 - 12:27pm
The giant panda is an endangered species and to help maintain wild populations, captive breeding is carried out. Due to the panda's biology, knowledge of when the femaile is in oestrus is essential. In work based on her aquaphotomics research, Roumiana Tsenkova and colleagues describe a method to achieve this, in “Spectral pattern of urinary water as a biomarker of estrus in the giant panda” which has been published in Scientific Reports (doi: 10.1038/srep00856). It is an Open Access paper so is freely available.
A special issue of JNIRS—Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy was published on Aquaphotomics in 2009.
You might also be interested in the story in our NIR e-newsletter on panda research at Memphis Zoo.
