2.3 Data analysis
We used the Mann-Whitney U test and one-way ANOVA to determine whether
the presence or absence of a sample line of animal trails influenced the
degree of preference for marking by pandas, based on whether the
independent variables conformed to a normal distribution and the
chi-squaredness of the variance; for the degree of preference for
different terrain we used the Kruskal Wallis test. In addition, we used
the Mann-Whitney U test as well as the chi-square test to determine
whether individual variables were significantly different between the
marker and control samples, and between the marked and control trees.
Afterwards, we used Pearson Correlation Analysis to determine the
correlation among the variables, and after eliminating the significantly
correlated variables, we used stepwise regression to build the best
model to determine which variable had the greatest effect on the
selection of marking sites by giant pandas. In this study, we determined
that the differences were statistically significant at P< 0.05 and all tests were two tailed. All data analysis was
carried out in IBM SPSS Statistics 27.0.1.