EAST LANSING, Mich. - After nearly three years of toil in a remote, rugged corner of China, Michigan State University researcher Vanessa Hull has succeeded in capturing a rare giant panda. Hull and her Chinese colleagues affixed a global positioning satellite-tracking collar to the adult female panda and promptly released her, with plans to monitor her movements through the mountainous Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province, China. "Her curious face is now forever etched in my mind. She is beautiful and is rather large, at 70-80 kg (about 165 pounds)," Hull wrote in a dispatch to MSU for her online journal. Hull, 28, is a graduate student working on her doctoral dissertation under Fisheries and Wildlife professor Jianguo "Jack" Liu, her academic adviser. "The success of capturing the first wild giant panda is a major milestone of this exciting interdisciplinary project, thanks to the persistent efforts by Vanessa Hull and her collaborators at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wolong Nature Reserve," Liu said. "With the aid of advanced technologies, the project will generate a wide variety of crucial data that were not available before," he said. "The new information will be critically important for the understanding of panda ecology and interactions with humans. It will lay a solid foundation for sustainable management of coupled human and natural systems, including the giant panda." Using GPS technology, Hull and her collaborators hope to gain a better sense of the movements of the shy but wily beasts. With perhaps 1,600 believed remaining, such information is hoped to help protect the popular, winsome creatures and their critical habitat, and to improve their prospects for survival when pandas born in captivity are released into the wild. "Pandas are among the most endangered animals in the world and we really need to look out for their long-term survival," Hull has explained. "We still don't know a lot about their life in the wild and which resources are ideal for them. Until we answer those questions, we're just guessing at setting up protected areas." What started out as a dissertation project now is a personal challenge Hull pursues despite the pandas' failure to cooperate until now and considerable personal hardship. The research station where she lives and works at the Wolong Nature Reserve - the center of world panda study and breeding - experienced a massive earthquake in May 2008 that killed some 90,000 people and left 5 million homeless. That event rendered the remote post even more difficult to reach and live in. Financial and logistical support for the project is provided by the National Science Foundation; NASA; MSU; the National Natural Science Foundation of China; China's Ministry of Science and Technology; the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Wolong Nature Reserve; China's State Forestry Administration; and the Sichuan Forestry Department. Read more here.