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BEIJING, June 30 (Xinhua) -- China has 2,740 nature reserves, covering 1.47 million square kilometers, a State Council report said Thursday.
This includes 446 national-level reserves, said the report submitted to an ongoing bi-monthly session of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee.
Nature reserves cover 1.42 million square kilometers of land, or 14.8 percent of the country's land mass, with the rest taken up by marine reserves, according to the report delivered by Minister of Environmental Protection Chen Jining.
The first reserve was established in 1956.
Eighty-nine percent of the species of state-protected wildlife and the majority of important natural relics are in nature reserves, and some rare and endangered species have seen population increases, the report showed.
The giant panda population in the wild now exceeds 1,800, thus, changing it from an endangered species to a vulnerable one.
Populations of Siberian tiger, Amur leopard, Asian elephant, crested ibis and elk have also increased, according to the report.
