After World War One, with improvements to the roads and railways, logging increased massively, peaking in 1961, almost entirely stripping the Otway Ranges of its old-growth forest and causing land degradation issues, but has since been greatly reduced.

[1] The Great Otway National Park is popular with Victorian, interstate, and international tourists, with a number of companies operating tours in the region.

[3] The park covers both coastline and hinterland in the Otway Ranges and so includes both beaches and forest, accessible via walking trails.

[4] The park has been identified by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area (IBA) because it supports populations of rufous bristlebirds, striated fieldwrens and pink robins, as well as numerous other species.

The Otway Ranges feature a cold rainforest biome with extreme winter rainfall, which owes to its highly exposed location in the far south-west of the state.

Heavy snowfalls occur on the higher peaks each year, such as Mount Cowley at 670 metres (2,200 ft); wet snow can also fall nearer to sea level on rare occasions.

Although hundreds of species of flora and fauna are listed in the Great Otway National Park Management Plan Archived 31 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine, there is only a single reference to fungi.

The Australian citizen-science organisation, Fungimap is also documenting and mapping the distribution of fungi including those that occur in the Great Otway National Park.

The ghost fungus (Omphalotus nidiformis) grows on trees and is another easily recognisable species, especially at night when it glows a pale green.