BEIJING– Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX), a world leader in storage solutions, today announced at Shaanxi Heihe National Forest Park the start of the Seagate Giant Panda Habitat Monitoring and Restoration Demonstration Program in Chinas Western Mountainous Areas. This effort is part of an ongoing partnership with Seagate and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The project calls on the public, businesses, and society at large to work together to better protect pandas and their habitats, as well as other wild species, to bring about harmony between ecological protection and sustainable development.

The Giant Panda habitats in Shaanxi, Sichuan and Gansu provinces are areas with rich biological diversity in western China and important areas for water and soil conservation, carbon sequestration, and are also major sources of energy for the surrounding regions. Four protected areas (Sichuan Xiaohegou Nature Reserve, Shaanxi Zhouzhi National Level Nature Reserve, Heihe National Forest Park, and Gansu Duoer Nature Reserve), will be selected for the demo project with the expectation of enhancing giant panda habitat management, accumulating experience for habitat monitoring and restoration in larger areas. The project aims to construct and improve data acquisition and analysis ability of the conservation units, find threatening factors based on monitoring, offer pertinent measures, and finally carry out targeted preventions and countermeasures. The plan will involve capacity building for the conservation units, conducting infrared camera monitoring in panda habitats, human disturbance monitoring and mitigation, and habitat restoration. In Heihe National Forest Park, the project will deploy a comprehensive Seagate security and surveillance solution to enhance the human disturbance management. The solution is high capacity, reliable, and is specially designed for surveillance.

Seagate is playing an important role in sustainable ecological development and is dedicated to implementing eco-protection programs while pursuing its own development. Paul Qian, director of cloud and enterprise OEM business at Seagate Technology said, We expect to open up a new perspective for biological diversity protection by supporting the WWF in this Giant Panda Project. In light of the successful experience of flagship species protection like the giant panda, we hope to further promote the biological diversity protection in China, contributing to worldwide biological diversity protection.

The infrared camera monitoring technology applied in the program is a new approach widely used in recent years in the monitoring of wild animals. The technology can work autonomously in the wild for a long time, offsetting the deficiencies of traditional investigation techniques to a great extent, making it less difficult to collect data. Seagate also offers cutting-edge and reliable data storage devices for monitoring activities including data protection and analysis.

WWF welcomes technology companies like Seagate to participate in panda conservation and biodiversity protection. New technologies and ideas can bring a fresh perspective to the issue. New partners tend to bring us new ideas and thoughts and we hope such cooperation can help bring the effect of 1+1>2, becoming a new start of our work, said Liu Xiaohai, executive director of programs, WWF China.

Apart from providing the most advanced products, technologies and solutions, Seagate actively participates in a broad spectrum of corporate social responsibility programs, including educational support, cultural protection, social vulnerable group protection and green technologies. Seagate has helped construct Seagate Hope Digital Libraries, the Seagate Tea-Horse Road Culture Digital Exhibition Center and the Seagate Ecological Forest Program. In the future, Seagate will continue with its corporate social responsibilities and promote the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature with the help of science and technology, and contribute to ecological civilization.

About Seagate

Seagate creates space for the human experience by innovating how data is stored, shared and used. Learn more at www.seagate.com.

About WWF

Established in 1996 and headquartered in Gland, Switzerland, World Wildlife Fund is one of the renowned and largest independent non-governmental organizations for environmental protection. WWF has offices in more than 80 countries around the world, with 2500 full-time employees, and more than 5 million volunteers. It has been over 50 years since its establishment and more than 13000 projects have been invested with about 10 billion dollars involved in the projects. WWF’s mission is to prevent the deterioration of natural environment, to create a bright future of harmony between human beings and nature.

WWF has been active in China since 1980, when it was invited by the Chinese government as the first international NGO to work on nature conservation. The Beijing office opened in 1996, and there are now 8 additional field programme offices spread across China on a broad range of conservation programmes including species, freshwater, forest, marine, climate change and energy, the green economy and footprint.