Chinese-led scientists sent out field observers across the mountain ranges in southwestern Sichuan province where the panda lives.

For four years, the observers recorded evidence of panda habitation, such as droppings and vegetation that had been trampled or foraged, and documented the type of forest where these signs had been found.

Pandas, as expected, holed up in places where there was lots of bamboo, which is their staple food.

But the team were intrigued to find that an equally important factor in panda numbers was a habitat rich in mature forest, which was far more preferred over "secondary-growth" forest, where trees were regrowing after logging.

Bamboo that grows beneath old trees may be more nutritious and old-growth trees may provide hollows that female pandas use for maternity dens, speculate the researchers, led by Fuwen Wei of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The findings are important because China is mulling a renewal of a ban, imposed more than a decade ago, on all logging in the panda area.

"It may be more cost-effective to protect the existing old growth than to open it up to logging, while protecting an equivalent area of secondary-growth forest," says the paper, published in Biology Letters, a journal of Britain's Royal Society.

Giant pandas are among the world's most endangered species, with about 1,600 living in the wild and over 300 bred in captivity at zoos.

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