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The working group on plants focused on the dense humid high forest or forêt dense très humide that was appropriate for the geographical area under consideration. The more open woodlands and shrublands forest or forêt sèche was excluded on the grounds that a separate prioritizing exercise was necessary to include all countries within the Sudanian zone. Prior to defining criteria for identifying priority areas, the group evaluated existing data and knowledge base for each of the five Upper Guinea countries using a pre-workshop compilation by the ECOSYN team at the Wageningen Agricultural University. The experts split up into groups for each country to identify and name forest areas using a recently classified NOAA satellite image of the region of Olsen (1994). This resulted in over 100 polygons of forest areas for the entire region, which were subsequently reduced to a total of 48 by clustering some areas according to forest zone in Ghana, Togo and Liberia, and others into larger forest blocks in Côte d'Ivoire. The conservation priorities given should be read independently by country.