Leading Australian scientist and environmentalist Tim Flannery has described it as "perhaps the least disturbed forest in all of Australia, the closest thing our continent offers to a true wilderness".

BBC: Tasmania��s true wilderness

Until a few years ago, assessing the amount of plant matter in a forest in a cheap and accurate manner seemed an insurmountable problem, according to Eric Dinerstein, chief scientist of the World Wide Fund for Nature, a conservation group that is also involved in the Nepalese lidar project.

ECONOMIST: Forest conservation