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Rainforest

Most of Australia's tropical and sub-tropical rainforests have been successfully nominated for World Heritage protection. The same does not hold true for Australia's temperate rainforests.

The Tarkine Wilderness rainforest is the largest temperate rainforest in Australia. The two major regions of rainforest, the Savage River and Meredith Range blocks, have been identified as being of more than sufficient size to maintain existing natural evolutionary processes.

According to the Commonwealth of Australia and State of Tasmania and Australian Heritage Commission (2001), 155,494 hectares (384,233 acres) of rainforest are located inside the Tarkine Wilderness. This equates to 41.2% of the entire Tarkine Wilderness, or 68.3% of the Tarkine's total forest cover. A fraction over 90% of all rainforest is old-growth, the other 10% occurring at various stages of succession.

The Tarkine's rainforest trees are almost wholly dominated by Myrtle-Beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii). The Arthur Lineament - a distinct north-east/south-west linear belt of metamorphosed Precambrian rocks - is particularly unique. It comprises the most extensive basalt plateau retaining its original vegetation in Tasmania. The soils associated with this type of geology are especially fertile and their original ecosystems have all but disappeared, having been replaced with agricultural and silvicultural development.

Much of the mixed wet eucalypt forests adjacent to rainforest exist at various successional stages and, notwithstanding disturbance events such as a wildfire,
will in time climax as rainforest. These forests feature particularly in the north-west Tarkine which suffered from fire disturbance in the early 1980s.

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