Two timber industry advocates who criticised high-profile Australian scientist David Lindenmayer on social media have been forced to retract their comments and apologise.   Professor Lindenmayer, an ecologist at the Australian National University who specialises in forest conservation, sued Justin Law and Matthew Leplaa for defamation in the Victorian County Court after they made personal attacks on him on social media.   As reported in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, in March 2020 the Goongerah Environment Centre in Gippsland wrote to Monique Dawson, the chief executive of logging agency VicForests, about logging in fire-affected forests, citing two research papers by Professor Lindenmayer.  …Mr Law, a spokesman for Fire and Wood Communities Australia, an alliance of timber industry supporters, used his now-deleted Twitter account to republish the VicForests statement on May 1 last year.