Fig 7. Multivariate analyses to identify the faecal fingerprints of soil samples from the Tofa site (Sai͡an Mountains) based on only the four compounds commonly used in the literature: coprostanol, epicoprostanol, 24-ethylcoprostanol and 24-ethylepicoprostanol.

PCA and HCPC of the four main 5β-stanols distribution (arcsine-root transformed) of reference faecal material from dog (D), horse (H), human (Hu) and reindeer (R) and soil samples (Saian). Reference and soil samples nomenclature can be found in S2 Table. (A) PCA score plot of PC1 and PC2. The high variance explained by the first two PCs is due to the low number of variables (four). (B) PCA correlation circle of PC1 and PC2. (C) Dendrogram obtained by HCPC from the first two PCs of the PCA.