ABSTRACT
The term rainforest was coined in 1898 by the German botanist, Andreas Schimper. In his revolutionary Plant-geography upon a Physiological Basis, Schimper shifted from the then general interest of botanists in identifying and classifying individual plants, to the study of groups of related plants. Under his new scheme, the dense vegetation of high-rainfall regions in both tropical and temperate areas was classified as Regenwald, which was then translated into English as Rainforest. In the 1980s, Australian governments came under increasing public pressure to preserve the rainforest from logging and farming. In 1980, the Ecological Association of Australia adopted what they claimed was the first ecologically based definition of rainforest and which represented ‘the consensus view of Australian ecologists’. In 1985, as part of an inquiry into the timber industry, the Victorian Government established a Rainforest Technical Committee to provide a scientific definition which would draw the line between eucalypt forests and rainforests.
