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The camera study, published in the Journal of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, reports that over 267,000 wildlife photos recorded more than 20 species, including wild boar, Japanese hare, macaques, pheasant, fox and the raccoon dog -- a relative of the fox -- in various areas of the landscape.
UGA wildlife biologist James Beasley said speculation and questions have come from both the scientific community and the general public about the status of wildlife years after a nuclear accident like those in Chernobyl and Fukushima.
This recent study, in addition to the team's research in Chernobyl, provides answers to the questions.
"Our results represent the first evidence that numerous species of wildlife are now abundant throughout the Fukushima Evacuation Zone, despite the presence of radiological contamination," said Beasley, associate professor at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.
Species that are often in conflict with humans, particularly wild boar, were predominantly captured on camera in human-evacuated areas or zones, according to Beasley.
"This suggests these species have increased in abundance following the evacuation of people."
The team, which included Thomas Hinton, professor at the Institute of Environmental Radioactivity at Fukushima University, identified three zones for the research.
Photographic data was gathered from 106 camera sites from three zones: humans excluded due to the highest level of contamination; humans restricted due to an intermediate level of contamination; and humans inhabited, an area where people have been allowed to remain due to "background" or very low levels of radiation found in the environment.
The researchers based their designations on zones previously established by the Japanese government after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident.
For 120 days, cameras captured over 46,000 images of wild boar. Over 26,000 of those images were taken in the uninhabited area, compared to approximately 13,000 in the restricted and 7,000 in the inhabited zones.
Other species seen in higher numbers in the uninhabited or restricted zones included raccoons, Japanese marten and Japanese macaque or monkeys.
Anticipating questions about physiological condition of the wildlife, Hinton said their results are not an assessment of an animal's health.
"This research makes an important contribution because it examines radiological impacts to populations of wildlife, whereas most previous studies have looked for effects to individual animals," said Hinton.
The uninhabited zone served as the control zone for the research.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09 2020, @09:53PM (33 children)
Wild is, by definition, the absence of people. If we want to have any wildlife left in another 100 years, we're going to need more exclusion zones than just the nuclear accident sites.
https://5050by2150.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 10 2020, @01:23PM (32 children)
We already have them and are making more. For example, here's a Wikipedia list [wikipedia.org] of of the largest protected areas in the world. They already cover well over than 5% of the Earth's total surface (more than 10 million square kilometers).
Meanwhile the two exclusion zones you mention are somewhere over 1000 square kilometers. We would need somewhere in the neighbor of 10,000 Chernobyls, all on non-overlapping land to get a comparable level of land.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 10 2020, @03:03PM (31 children)
They do, although "protected" has wildly varying degrees of meaning - much like the US "National Forests" where the trees are periodically given away to industry some of these marine protected areas are name only with zero enforcement.
Also, your list is marine only. While there are a few true protected areas on land that aren't nuclear accident sites, they still mostly comprise land that people want the least - much like the Indian reservations granted by the US government.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 11 2020, @06:15AM (30 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 11 2020, @07:21PM (29 children)
True - unless a coordinated attack manages to melt 'em all down.
Also true, there's nowhere near enough protected land - in the real sense - to allow anything resembling the natural world of 500-1500AD to continue into the future. The species we're displacing first are the ones we evolved with, sending them to extinction first would seem to be the opposite of a good idea.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 12 2020, @06:16AM (8 children)
Maybe by aliens who want our water and women? These stories just write themselves.
Still doesn't mean that it can't be enough to protect most of the organisms you care about.
Like dogs, rats, and cats?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 12 2020, @02:11PM (7 children)
The height of hubris: assuming you know anything about what it takes to maintain a stable global ecosystem.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 12 2020, @04:19PM (6 children)
You're sitting in the middle of a stable global ecosystem. You know something about it, even if you think you don't.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 13 2020, @04:01AM (5 children)
Most advanced scientists know enough to know that they don't know much compared to what there is to know.
What we do know, based on the fossil records, is that we are already in the 6th mass extinction event. If you call that stable, I'm voting against you in the next election.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 13 2020, @05:10AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 13 2020, @02:01PM (3 children)
It's interesting that you spend more time meta arguing than considering the topic.
The sixth mass extinction event isn't in the realm of advanced science - it's out there with things like heavy and light objects falling at the same speed in the earth's gravity.
As for our understanding of ecosystems: the advanced science understands a lot - not enough to really predict outcomes, but enough to typically forecast at least short term trends in local areas.
The thing that's truly lacking is the politics to enforce positive interventions based on science, as well as the meta problem of getting politics to acknowledge the best science over the most politically convenient science, that has been demonstrated millions of times the world over in just the last 50 years.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 13 2020, @04:59PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 13 2020, @08:02PM (1 child)
h. sapiens has been kicking ass since long before mass utilization of fossil fuels - the megafauna of everywhere but Africa (where they co-evolved) are just one example.
No, one doesn't - it's actually a dead simple solution to what the captains of industry are telling our politicians to tell our scientists to tell us is such a complex, opaque problem.
https://www.half-earthproject.org/ [half-earthproject.org]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 14 2020, @03:19AM
Which captains of industry would that be? I'm really not getting why you're posting all this.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 13 2020, @05:12AM (19 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 13 2020, @02:06PM (18 children)
On that point, I wholeheartedly agree. However, there are approximately 450 civilian nuke power plants out there, and the Chernobyl exclusion zone is approximately 1000 square miles. 450,000 square miles is only ~1% of the Earth's surface, but it's far more than is in truly effective nature preserves right now, particularly in non-wasteland areas.
The thing that makes Fukushima and Chernobyl unique is that humans actually respect the exclusion zones, they're not cheating and "just taking a little" from the land / wildlife.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 14 2020, @03:21AM
Hmmm, I thought it was smaller. Turned out I was confusing a radius of 30 km with a diameter of 30 km.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 14 2020, @01:33PM (16 children)
I missed this weasel phrase. The protection can be really shitty and still be more than good enough. For example, in the US most BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land is sufficiently devoid of humans (despite being readily used for pastureland, mining, and timber) and sufficiently non-wasteland to count. Wild organisms need habitat and migration routes (if global warming turns out as dire as claimed). They don't need much else.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 14 2020, @02:33PM (15 children)
While some protection is better than none, Chernobyl and Fukushima clearly demonstrate that total protection is better than shitty protection.
Shitty protection still invites poachers of high value animals and predators which has repercussions throughout the ecosystem. Get rid of wolves and the aspen forests dwindle to grasslands...
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 14 2020, @06:17PM (14 children)
What "total protection" are they demonstrating? It's basically just a temporary pause on who uses a small spot of land - Chernobyl for almost 34 years and Fukushima for almost 9 years. That these short pauses result in a huge surge in animal life indicates that even shitty protection would show remarkable gains.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 14 2020, @08:04PM (13 children)
What they both showed is that a "temporary pause" of less than 10 years results in a huge surge of animal life, far beyond the "protected forests" of the world that have had that shittily enforced protected status for many decades.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 14 2020, @08:28PM (12 children)
What gave you that impression? The story makes no such comparison.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 14 2020, @08:52PM (11 children)
You think I read TFA? Ha! No, actually I've read several other articles about Chernobyl and one or two about Fukushima that DO draw comparisons to similar areas. The closest approximate forest to Chernobyl is in Poland, and even it lacks the abundance of wildlife that showed up in Chernobyl after 5-10 years.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 14 2020, @09:58PM (10 children)
Meaning what? I found several conservation sites [wikipedia.org] in Ukraine which were much closer (and at least one [wikipedia.org] of them had comparable diversity). Why weren't these considered in your alleged research article?
Biodiversity is not the same everywhere and it depends on what's around (like rivers, microclimate variation, altitude variation, boundary of different ecosystems, prehistory, etc). Telling me that some forest in Poland allegedly has worse biodiversity means nothing to me. We have to consider a lot of confounding factors - something your "advanced" scientists would have to do as well.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:15PM (9 children)
So, would that be an unbiased longitudinal survey of the available data, or just trolling Google for some links that back up your argument? I mean, if this is high school debate, then trolling Google is pretty much top form - congrats.
Notable tidbit from your source [rada.gov.ua]: all of these laws were enacted at least 6 years after the Chernobyl event, interestingly about the same time the initial beneficial effects of the Chernobyl exclusion zone on wildlife were first published.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 16 2020, @03:24AM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 16 2020, @02:39PM (7 children)
I respect honesty. And, while I also respect the value of "super science," I recognize the extreme difficulty involved in verifying it. Just one example: we have researchers in Western Hawaii documenting all kinds of environmental measures there, but... who's verifying their results? Assuming they like their jobs and have a little bit of political savvy, do you think there's no bias in their investigations toward continued employment?
IFF we can get truly independently verified results we can trust, those can be highly valuable accurate guides for policy, IFF policy is really being crafted for the long term good and not re-election next term.
In my experience, somewhere between 51 and 70% of research I go to verify actually checks out, and something less than 50% of policy takes the long view - which is why, in reality, I think an arbitrary approach [wordpress.com] to preservation may actually be superior.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 16 2020, @09:10PM (6 children)
My take is just put as much as possible of the low demand land and sea into some level of protection, then see if it's enough.
As to the diversity of these abandoned nuclear sites, it's worth remembering that nuclear sites require both stability and cooling. This naturally results in locations that are more environmentally diverse, with solid ground, and river or shore in close proximity.
Finally, I think this matter of large scale conservation is being solved. I don't think we'll reach 50% by 2100, but I do think we'll be well on our way to that target.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 16 2020, @10:02PM (5 children)
My take is: we're already pushing the carrying capacity of the environment - sure, we can support more people on less with smarter blah blah blah, realistically, the way we are today, 8B is screwing the environment, period.
There will be population capping, whether "naturally", mandated, or by force of societal collapse.
Why not work toward a population cap that doesn't max out the environment - odds are that a functioning ecosystem on 50% of the planet will support a larger overall population than what we'll get if we "fully utilize" 99% of it and screw the ecosystem in the process.
So, treat the ecosystem the way the U.S. treated the natives... that didn't work out so well for the natives, overall. Sure, some are surviving, but...
Aaaaand... those are fairly clearly more important to preserve than the low demand areas.
If, by well on the way, you mean like Trump will have his wall finished by 2020 - yeah, that's the kind of trajectory I see us on.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 17 2020, @08:21AM (4 children)
Already done. We call it the developed world - just add greater wealth and women's liberation.
Only if a significant portion of that "8B" isn't living on it or depending for their food on it, and there's some way for that diversity to get to the area.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 17 2020, @03:10PM (3 children)
Past performance is no guarantee of future returns...
So, preserve may be the wrong word, it matters less what's "virgin pre-human" or even what's there now - reserve is more like it. The areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima were as screwed as any other until they became exclusion zones. Ditto for marine reserves where they have actually enforced harvesting bans - geographic bans have proven time and again tremendously more effective than seasons, species specific protections, etc.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 18 2020, @04:04AM (2 children)
Keep in mind that phrase comes from the financial world where large short term gains are strongly correlated with weaker than average future gains. In the world, human fertility and many of the other problems you've mentioned are strongly negatively correlated with the wealth of society and empowerment of women. And there is not a country out there that doesn't show substantial declines in human fertility over the past half century. Not a one. Almost all countries similarly show increasing wealth with a few holdouts like North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela.
So sure, we can pretend that somehow future trends won't match the many decades of present day trends. But that's not what the smart money would do.
Whatever is done merely needs to be effective enough.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 18 2020, @04:46PM (1 child)
In a sample of one 50 year epoch, sure. The next 50 years are as likely to resemble the previous 50 years as those 50 years resembled the 50 before them.
Or, we can pretend that future trends will match the past decades of present day trends - but it's still pretending. The stakes are far more important than money.
Which, taken on a global scale for lands deeemed "protected" is, on average, lacking / far short of effective enough.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 18 2020, @07:53PM
I guess you weren't paying attention to the previous epoch either.