Forestry authorities in northwest China's Shaanxi Province said on March 26 that they had begun combing forests for giant pandas in order to determine how many of the endangered animals are living in the wild.

The census in Shaanxi, one of the major habitats of giant pandas, is part of a once-adecade nationwide panda census ordered last year by the State Forestry Administration.

This is the fourth nationwide giant panda census since the program was launched in the 1970s.

Field research in Shaanxi is expected to finish by October 2013.

The previous census counted 1,596 wild pandas in China. At that time, 273 of them lived in Shaanxi and a majority of the rest lived in neighboring Sichuan Province.

Sichuan started the census last October.