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Update:December 15, 2017
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Article title |
Temporal changes in the radiocesium distribution in forests over the five years after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident |
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Author (affiliation) |
Naohiro Imamura (a), Masabumi Komatsu (b), Shinta Ohashi (c), Shoji Hashimoto (d), Takuya Kajimoto (e), Shinji Kaneko (a), Tsutomu Takano (f) (a) Center for Forest Restoration and Radioecology, FFPRI, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. (d) Department of Forest Soils, FFPRI, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. (e) Tohoku Research Center, FFPRI, Morioka, Iwate, Japan (f) Research Planning and Coordination Department, FFPRI, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan |
Publication Journal |
Scientific Reports, 7:8179, August 2017, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-08261-x( External link ) |
Content introduction |
After the accident at the TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, we conducted a 5-year investigation to reveal the dynamics of radiocesium within forest ecosystems. In August 2011, we established investigation sites in nine forests (sugi cedar, hinoki cypress, konara oak, and akamatsu pine forests located in the villages of Kawauchi and Ohtama and the town of Tadami in the Fukushima Prefecture and Mount Tsukuba in the Ibaraki Prefecture). At these sites, we monitored changes in the concentration and inventory of radiocesium present in the needles of leaves, branches, bark, and stem wood of trees, as well as in the organic and mineral soil layers (Figure 1). Changes in the distribution of radiocesium in these forests over the 5 years after the accident are described below. The above results demonstrated that radiocesium from the Fukushima nuclear disaster migrated down from the trees into the soil and mostly remained present in the surface soil. This study is the first comprehensive assessment of the long-term dynamics of radiocesium within forest ecosystems in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The data will be invaluable on a world scale. We hope that these findings will be applied in the forestry management of affected areas and will assist in developing long-term prediction models for radionuclides in the future.
Figure 1. (a) Locations of the investigation sites. (b) and (c) Sampling of stem wood and soil specimens.
Figure 2. Chronological changes in radiocesium concentrations in each tree part.The graphs show results obtained from sugi cedar, konara oak, and akamatsu pine forests in Ohtama village. The lines are drawn to signify statistically significant changes.
Figure 3. Chronological changes of the distribution of radiocesium inventories in cedar forests. The left and right graphs show results from a sugi cedar forest in Kawauchi Village and a konara oak forest in Ohtama Village, respectively. |
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