Two decades of land cover change and anthropogenic pressure around Bontioli Nature Reserve in Burkina Faso

• Lack of local communities' involvement in protected area management, increases anthropogenic pressure on forest resources. • Natural reserve governance and policy should integrate local population change dynamics and needs for sustainability. • Effective conservation intervention in protected areas' land cover change monitoring can enable the achievement of SDG15. • The local population participation can effectively contribute to preserving natural reserves and improving ecosystem services in dryland. • Leveraging innovation and farming technological development could reduce the potential effects of anthropogenic pressure on Natural Resources. Protected areas (PAs) are critical for ecosystem maintenance and providing services that benefit both wildlife and people. Nevertheless, climate change and anthropogenic pressures are posing an increasing challenge. Surrounded by high human population densities, there is still a paucity of information on how the land cover in Burkina Faso's PAs is changing, and what kinds of human activities are the main drivers. In this study, we examined the change in land use and land cover (LULC) in the Bontioli Nature Reserve (NR), one of Burkina Faso's most important protected areas, and assessed anthropogenic pressure within and around. Landsat imagery (ETM+ and OLI-TIRS) is used to categorise and estimate the change in LULC in 2000, 2010, and 2022 with the Random Forest algorithm on the Google Earth Engine platform. Regression analysis was applied to examine the relationship between the LULC categories and population increase. We found significant changes and correlations in LULC trends and population growth over time. From 2000 to 2022, wooded savanna, tree savanna, and shrub savanna decreased by 20.8 %, 6.8 %, and 4.5 %, respectively, while cropland increased by 26.3 %, along with grass savanna by 5 %. Population growth correlated with increased agriculture and decreased vegetative area with R 2 of 0.903 and 0.793, respectively. Efforts should be made to create harmony between humans and nature through various approaches such as nature-based solutions to enable efforts for the reserve sustainable management (SDG15).