Upper Guinean forests

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Upper Guinean forests is a tropical moist forest region of West Africa. The Upper Guinean forests extend from Guinea and Sierra Leone in the west through Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana to Togo in the east, and a few hundred kilometers inland from the Atlantic coast. A few enclaves of montane forest lie further inland in the mountains of central Guinea and central Togo and Benin. In the drier interior, the Upper Guinean forests yield to the Guinean forest-savanna mosaic, a belt of dry forests and savannas that lies between the coastal forests and the savannas and grasslands of the Sudan further north. The Dahomey Gap, a region of Togo and Benin where the Guinean forest-savanna mosaic extends to the Atlantic coast, separates the Upper Guinean forests from the Lower Guinean forests to the east, which extend from eastern Benin through Nigeria, Cameroon, and south along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) designated the Upper Guinean forests, which it calls the Guinean moist forests, as one of its Global 200 critical regions for conservation. The WWF divides the Upper Guinean forests into three ecoregions. The Western Guinean lowland forests extend from Guinea and Sierra Leone through Liberia and southeastern Côte d'Ivoire as far as the Sassandra River. Guinean montane forests are found at higher elevations in the highlands of central Guinea, northern Sierra Leone, and eastern Côte d'Ivoire. The Eastern Guinean forests extend east from the Sassandra River through Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana to western Togo, with a few isolated enclaves further inland in the highlands of central Togo and Benin.