List of amphibian species (Vertebrata, Tetrapoda) of Burkina Faso

Abstract

We related the first commented list of the amphibian species of Burkina Faso. To obtain contemporary data, we investigated six sites from July 2017 to September 2018. The survey is unique for West Africa in combining a variety of different habitat types, e.g. Sahelian areas, grassland and woodland savannahs, floodplains, gallery forests and agricultural sites. Animals were found at varying spatial scales by opportunistic visual encounter surveys after sunset supplemented with acoustic searching. Further data were based on museum vouchers collected between the years 1959 and 2011 and deposited in European and American museums, and the literature review focusing on the country species. We listed 36 anuran species from 11 families. Surprisingly seven taxa, namely Arthroleptis poecilonotus Peters, 1863, Afrixalus vittiger (Peters, 1876), Afrixalus weidholzi (Mertens, 1938), Kassina cassinoides (Boulenger, 1903), Ptychadena schillukorum (Werner, 1908), Hyperolius lamottei Laurent, 1958 and Amnirana albolabris (west) (Jongsma et al. 2018), were new country records. A few rare, hard to record or little known species, including Arthroleptis poecilonotus, Hyperolius lamottei, Xenopus tropicalis (Gray, 1864) and Amnirana albolabris (west) can be confirmed. The origin of a specimen of Sclerophrys mauritanica (Schlegel, 1841) mentioned as coming from Burkina Faso deposited in the collections of MNHN must be considered as an error. We briefly discussed the taxonomy and indicated the habitats of all species mentioned in this country so far. The discovery of several new country records highlights that the amphibian fauna of Burkina Faso is still incompletely known and that many poorly explored sites may still harbour a high diversity.