TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zizka, Alexander
A1  - Thiombiano, Adjima
A1  - Dressler, Stefan
A1  - Nacoulma, Blandine Marie Ivette
A1  - Ouédraogo, Amadé
A1  - Ouédraogo, Issaka
A1  - Ouédraogo, Oumarou
A1  - Zizka, Georg
A1  - Hahn-Hadjali, Karen
A1  - Schmidt, Marco
T1  - Traditional plant use in Burkina Faso (West Africa) : a national-scale analysis with focus on traditional medicine
T2  - Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine
N2  - Background: The West African country of Burkina Faso (BFA) is an example for the enduring importance of traditional plant use today. A large proportion of its 17 million inhabitants lives in rural communities and strongly depends on local plant products for their livelihood. However, literature on traditional plant use is still scarce and a comprehensive analysis for the country is still missing.
Methods: In this study we combine the information of a recently published plant checklist with information from ethnobotanical literature for a comprehensive, national scale analysis of plant use in Burkina Faso. We quantify the application of plant species in 10 different use categories, evaluate plant use on a plant family level and use the relative importance index to rank all species in the country according to their usefulness. We focus on traditional medicine and quantify the use of plants as remedy against 22 classes of health disorders, evaluate plant use in traditional medicine on the level of plant families and rank all species used in traditional medicine according to their respective usefulness.
Results: A total of 1033 species (50%) in Burkina Faso had a documented use. Traditional medicine, human nutrition and animal fodder were the most important use categories. The 12 most common plant families in BFA differed considerably in their usefulness and application. Fabaceae, Poaceae and Malvaceae were the plant families with the most used species. In this study Khaya senegalensis, Adansonia digitata and Diospyros mespiliformis were ranked the top useful plants in BFA. Infections/Infestations, digestive system disorders and genitourinary disorders are the health problems most commonly addressed with medicinal plants. Fabaceae, Poaceae, Asteraceae, Apocynaceae, Malvaceae and Rubiaceae were the most important plant families in traditional medicine. Tamarindus indica, Vitellaria paradoxa and Adansonia digitata were ranked the most important medicinal plants.
Conclusions: The national-scale analysis revealed systematic patterns of traditional plant use throughout BFA. These results are of interest for applied research, as a detailed knowledge of traditional plant use can a) help to communicate conservation needs and b) facilitate future research on drug screening.
KW  - Ethnobotany
KW  - Medicinal plants
KW  - Traditional medicine
KW  - Economic botany
KW  - Usefulness
KW  - Relative importance index
KW  - West Africa
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/44049
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-440494
SN  - 1746-4269
N1  - Copyright: © Zizka et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
VL  - 11
IS  - Art. 9
SP  - 1
EP  - 10
PB  - BioMed Central
CY  - London
ER  -