**Author details**

*Soil Erosion - Current Challenges and Future Perspectives in a Changing World*

**4.2 Impacts of soil degradation on vegetation structure**

and highly degraded soils).

on extremely degraded soils.

**5. Conclusion**

along the gradient while species with wide distribution or immigrant species increase in number and are numerous on very disturbed areas [21, 45]. Thus, the vegetation trend over the different soil degradation classes followed a retrograde succession from the least disturbed soils (slightly degraded soils) to the most disturbed soils (extremely degraded soils) through intermediate stages (moderately

Vegetation cover was used in the study as a measure of vegetation structure. With respect to vegetation cover data, the results showed that only moderately and highly degraded soil vegetation cover data were significantly similar (p > 0.05). Vegetation cover data provide information on vegetation type and may be used in gradients studies to investigate the effects of environmental factors on plant abundance [46, 47]. These results could be explained by the vegetation type found on each soil degradation class. Shrub savannas were the vegetation type found both on moderately and highly degraded soils. The types of vegetation observed on slightly and extremely degraded soils are tree/shrub savannas and herbaceous savannas respectively. The results of the impacts of soil degradation on vegetation structure namely vegetation type demonstrated the abundance of phanerophytes on slightly degraded soils, a decrease of the abundance of phanerophytes to the profit of therophytes on intermediate degradation classes and an abundance of therophytes

Soil degradation impacts vegetation in various ways. Floristic composition (presence/absence of species), species richness, chorological, life forms, dispersal types and vegetation type (tree and shrub savannas on light degraded soils, shrub savannas on high degraded soils and grass savannas on extreme degraded soils) were the different aspects of vegetation which were modified along the gradient of soil degradation. The overall trend observed, showed the degradation of vegetation along the gradient of degradation of soils. The findings confirmed the negative impact of land degradation on vegetation and plant diversity. The results provided a good overview of the relationship between soil degradation and vegetation, useful for management policies. The study did not attempt to characterize the vegetation found on each degradation class, but rather to test the effects of soil degradation gradients on some measures of phytodiversity and vegetation structure. However, one limitation of this evaluation could be the low number of plots considered, which makes it difficult to generalize the results at the level of the whole study area. Further researches should be conducted in order to eliminate the

This work was entirely supported by UNDESERT project (EU FP7 243906), "Understanding and combating desertification to mitigate its impact on ecosystem services" funded by the European Commission, Directorate General for Research and Innovation, Environment Programme for financial support. The main goal of the project was to raise the understanding of how degradation and desertification

processes affect biodiversity, soil and human livelihoods.

**84**

limitation.

**Acknowledgements**

Farris Okou\*, Achille Assogbadjo and Brice Augustin Sinsin Laboratory of Applied Ecology, University of Abomey-Calavi, Abomey-Calavi, Benin

\*Address all correspondence to: farrisokou@gmail.com

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
