For the Aichi Biodiversity Targets to be met in full, and for the other relevant processes to be successful, examples and guidelines for the identification of important pelagic areas must be made available to policy makers involved in the process of identifying ecologically or biologically significant areas (EBSAs). In an effort to provide such examples and guidelines, a workshop of 27 international experts on pelagic biodiversity was convened by the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative (GOBI) and the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab (MGEL) of Duke University. The context for that workshop and the examples and guidelines developed by the experts are presented in this report.