orests are economically valuable, and have been subject to aggressive logging throughout the world. This has led to man

y conflicts between logging companies and environmental groups. From certain forestry perspectives, fully maintain

ing an old-growth forest is seen as extremely economically unproductive, as timber can only be collec

ted from falling trees, and also potentially damaging to nearby managed groves by creating environments conducive to root rot. It may be more productive to cut the old growth down and replace the forest with a younger one.[citation needed] The island of Tasmania, just off the southeast coast of Australia, has the largest amount of temperate old-growth rainforest reserves in Australia with around 1,239,000 hectares in total. While the local Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) was originally designed to protect much of this natural wealth, many of the RFA old-growth forests protected in Tasmania consist of trees of little use to the timber industry. RFA old-growth and high conservation value forests that contain species highly desirable to the fores