Chernobyl area has ‘abundant wildlife’

However, new evidence, which is based on census data that is long term, showed that populations of mammals have increased. The 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant in Ukraine was maybe the world’s most catastrophic nuclear disaster.

Radiation levels after the explosion were said to be higher than the “Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings”.

After almost 30 years of abandonment, a study released in Current Biology revealed that wildlife has been thriving in the absence of human involvement in Chernobyl.

One caveat of the study’s findings is that it only studied large mammals. Since then the area has evolved into a thriving nature reserve from a disaster area, teeming with deer, elk and wolves, said a group of scientists Monday afternoon. They include the Braslav Lakes National Park, Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve, Narochansky National Park, and Belovezhskaya Puscha National Park.

They also found that the elk and wild boar populations in the exclusion zone were rising during a period in the early 1990s when those species’ populations were dropping in other former Soviet Union countries – a decline likely brought on by socioeconomic changes leading to rural poverty and poorer wildlife management.

“That natural life began expanding when people surrendered the region in 1986 is not weighty news”, Hinton, a radioecology master and co-creator on the paper, told The Washington Post. “What’s surprising here was the life was able to increase even in an area that is among the most radioactively contaminated in the world”. Brown bears and lynx moved in after the area was abandoned. Brown bears and rare European lynx – predatory cats the size of a Great Dane with tufted ears and glimmering gold eyes – quickly appeared in the forests, even though they hadn’t been seen for decades before the accident. Hinton also said that the bears “took up residence in the abandoned buildings”. “This doesn’t mean radiation is good for wildlife, just that the effects of human habitation, including hunting, farming and forestry, are a lot worse”, said Jim Smith, a professor of environmental science at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom and the team’s coordinator. What the study shows is that humans are not good for wildlife.

“These unique data showing a wide range of animals thriving within miles of a major nuclear accident illustrate the resilience of wildlife populations when freed from the pressures of human habitation”, says Jim Beasley, a study co-author at the University of Georgia.