Abundance, richness and use of medicinal plants under different land uses in the Guinea Savanna zone of Northern Ghana

Abstract

Change in land use affects the conservation of medicinal plants. We assessed the abundance and richness of medicinal plants under different land-use systems in Ghana. The land-use types consisted of protected area (PA), Fallowed Land (FL) and Farmed area (FA). A total of 45 quadrats (30 m × 30 m) were laid randomly and medicinal plants identified. Soil samples (0–15 cm) were also collected from nested quadrats for physiochemical analysis. Additionally, ethnobotanical survey of 210 key informants was carried out using Snowball sampling method to identify plant parts used and ailments treated. The result identified 107 species of medicinal plants, and the roots (34.4%) and bark (33.3%) were mostly used. PA had higher (P < 0.05) abundance (81.75 ± 6.74) and richness (19.80 ± 0.96) while FA had the least. The principal component analysis (PCA) showed that PC1 accounted for 48.7% of the variance with abundance (0.8092), richness (0.9168), TN (0.9312) and ECEC (0.7789) positively loaded on it. The PC2 accounted for 24.1% of the variance in the soil physical properties. We established that integrating medical plants into crops as Agroforestry system can improve their conservation. Our findings have implications for the attainment of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) 3 , 13 and 15 .

Keywords

• Biodiversity
• conservation
• sustainable development goals (SDGs)
• fallowed land
• agroforestry