conservation programs were crossbreeding what they described as five distinct species of Chinese giant salamanders. All the wild populations studied were found "critically depleted or extirpated" by the study. A related study found that some of the five distinct genetic lineages were probably already extinct in the wild. However, the exhaustiveness of these surveys was questioned in a 2022 study by Chai et al., who noted that over a third of the surveys had been performed only in Guizhou Province, and another third of the surveys had been performed in provinces that were only selected by habitat suitability modeling and had no actual historic records of giant salamanders. Based on this, the extent of extirpation of Chinese Andrias remains uncertain, especially as a natural population of Andrias jiangxiensis was discovered during the Chai et al. study. Conservation efforts To understand the conservation efforts in China, it is important to know something about the events of the several past hundred years of China's history relating to social attitudes, pressures on nature and natural resources, and the political ambition to safeguard the natural environment. Each of these are significant factors and determinants of conservation efforts. Up until the year 1700, China was a country that was rampant with land reclamations, growing land exploitation, and wars. These series of events led to a huge upsurge in the diminishing of the natural biomass and as well as a reduction in spatial distribution of biotic resources. The significance of this situation was that this drastic dwindling of resources made the people of this region aware of the relationship between utilization and conservation. From 1911 to 1949, China began to move into the direction of modern industry, urbanization, civil wars, and agriculture. This transition period brought with it the depletion and disappearance of various renewable resources, as well as the pollution of various biotopes. This lack of conservation eventually led to a deteriorating environment, which meant lower standards of living for the Chinese population. This is the point when both the government and the people of China came to the epiphany that the environment matters. It was not until 1956 that modern nature conservation efforts begin to develop. The Chinese reforms that preceded this new Chinese perspective on conservation were not only beneficial to the Chinese giant salamander, but all organisms that occupied the natural environment of China. There was a formation of a new administrative