The ecoregion occupies rolling hills of sandy soil drained by the Kabompo River in western Zambia, with one enclave spilling across the border into Angola. The hills sit at 1,100 to 1,200 meters elevation, high enough for the climate to stay moderate - average annual temperature around 21 degrees Celsius - but the sand below the trees changes everything. Water drains through it almost as soon as it arrives. Nutrients leach downward with every rain. The Western Zambezian grasslands separate the forest patches from one another; the Barotse Floodplain lies to the southwest; the Central Zambezian miombo woodlands occupy better soils to the east, and the Angolan miombo woodlands to the west. The evergreen forests are what grew where miombo couldn't - where the soil was too poor for the usual African woodland species to dominate, and where a handful of hardy tree types could specialize instead.

The characteristic tree here is the mavunda, Cryptosepalum exfoliatum pseudotaxus - a tall evergreen that gives the forest its scientific alias, Zambezian Cryptosepalum dry forest. The mavunda hold their leaves through the long dry season, depending on deep roots to reach water the sand does not keep. Around them grow miombo relatives - Brachystegia spiciformis, Brachystegia longifolia, Brachystegia floribunda - along with mopane (Colophospermum mopane), highland waterberry (Syzygium guineense afromontanum), Bersama abyssinica, Erythrophleum africanum, and Combretum elaeagnoides. In the denser stands, the overlapping canopy keeps light levels low enough for mosses to carpet the forest floor - an unusual sight in a region of high evaporation and strong seasonal sun. Creepers and shrub thickets fill in the middle story, creating the dense interior that gives the forest its tropical character.

The forest is modest in mammals - yellow-backed duiker, blue duiker, their predators, bushpigs. The only two endemic species are Rosevear's striped grass mouse and the white-chested tinkerbird, Pogoniulus makawai. The tinkerbird is the mystery of the ecoregion: it has not been reliably spotted since 1964, and may in fact be an unusual variant of the common yellow-rumped tinkerbird rather than a separate species. Where the forest truly sings, though, is in its wider bird life. Nearly 400 species have been recorded here, including a distinct subspecies of the crested guineafowl (Guttera edouardi kathleenae), Ross's turaco with its flamboyant purple and crimson plumage, Cabanis's greenbul, the olive long-tailed cuckoo, purple-throated cuckoo-shrike, Boulton's batis, the African crested-flycatcher, common square-tailed drongo, black-fronted bushshrike, Perrin's bushshrike, olive sunbird, forest weaver, and black-tailed waxbill. For bird-focused visitors willing to make the long drive into Barotseland, few places in Southern Africa offer this density of specialty species in so little-visited a landscape.

These forests have survived largely because nobody wanted them. The sandy soil supports scarcely any agriculture. Surface water is limited, making permanent settlement difficult. The combination has left the ecoregion fairly undisturbed, with poaching of wildlife the main ongoing pressure. More formal conservation has built up gradually; 23.21 percent of the ecoregion sits within protected areas, including Kafue National Park - Zambia's largest - and West Lunga National Park, along with the Chibwika Ntambu, Chizera, Lukwakwa, and West Zambezi game management areas, and the Chavuma, Kasesi, Mambwe, and Namboma forest reserves. What remains outside these boundaries is still largely intact, kept as it was by the very characteristics that make it poor for human use. The mavunda stands remain one of the least-studied major forests in Africa, and researchers note that more work is needed on both the flora and fauna of the region - the ecoregion still holds its secrets with the privacy of a place few people have bothered to catalog.