Modeling the Distribution of Plant Species and Diversity Patterns In- and Outside of a Protected Area in a West African Savanna

In West Africa, rural households use several plant products from a wide range of species to meet their everyday needs and as a source of additional incomes (Kristensen and Balslev 2003; Taita 2003; Belem et al. 2007; Paré et al. 2010a). However, West African savannas are subject to drastic land use and climate changes (IPCC 2007; Wittig et al. 2007; Brink and Eva 2009; Ouédraogo et al. 2010) that are thought to change species composition and distribution (Da 2010; Heubes et al. 2011). There is an urgent need to better understand the effects of climate and land use changes on plant diversity patterns in savannas and their underlying factors. Species distribution models (SDM) present a robust methodology which has increasingly been used over the last two decades to relate biological data to environmental factors (e.g. Guisan and Thuiller 2005; Ferrier and Guisan 2006). Efforts have been made in understanding species distribution and plant diversity patterns in West Africa (Schmidt 2006; Da 2010; Márquez 2010; Heubes 2012) at regional or national scale, but there are no published data about the factors influencing these patterns at local scale. Nacoulma et al. (2011) showed that plant diversity differed between a protected and communal area. Thus, we hypothesized that land use is an important factor for species distribution at local scale. We investigated the distributions of protected and non-protected plant species and diversity patterns in- and outside of a protected area in a West African savanna (W- National Park, Burkina Faso). We aimed to assess the influence of land use and other environmental factors on the species distribution and diversity patterns.