Abstract
Abstract. There are international recommendations that the environment (i.e. wildlife) is assessed for the potential impact of releases of ionizing radiation. The transfer of radionuclides to wildlife from media (e.g. soil, water) is usually described using the whole-organism concentration ratio (CRwo-media), and a number of assessment models use these values to estimate radiation exposure and risk to wildlife; however, there are many gaps in knowledge. This paper describes a study conducted in 2015–2016 to sample terrestrial wildlife, soil and water from two forests in north-eastern England. Sampling was targeted towards species representative of the International Commission on Radiological Protection's (ICRP) terrestrial Reference Animals and Plants (RAPs): Wild Grass (Poaceae family), Pine Tree (Pinaceae family), Earthworm (Lumbricidae family), Bee (Apidae family), Rat (Muridae family), Deer (Cervidae family) and Frog (Ranidae family); opportunistic sampling of plant and fungi species was also conducted. The dataset comprises stable-element concentrations for 30 elements, radionuclide activity concentrations for K-40 and Cs-137, and radionuclide and stable-element concentration ratios. These data have significantly increased the number of CRwo-media values available for the ICRP RAPs and will contribute to the development of the databases underpinning the ICRP's environmental protection framework. Data will be included in the international database of wildlife transfer parameters for radioecological models and hence are likely to contribute to model developments in the future. All data and supporting documentation are freely available from the Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC; https://eidc.ac.uk/, last access: 13 November 2020) under the terms and conditions of the Open Government Licence (Barnett et al., 2020 https://doi.org/10.5285/8f85c188-a915-46ac-966a-95fcb1491be6).
Highlights
Over the last 20 years there has been a step change in international radiological protection, requiring assessment of environmental impacts of ionizing radiation releases rather than assuming that protecting humans ensures protection of other species (ICRP, 2007; IAEA, 2014a)
In Barnett et al (2014), we presented the first such study, which was conducted in north-western England; subsequently studies have been published for sites in Spain, Norway and the Ukrainian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (Guillén et al, 2017, 2018; Thørring et al, 2016; Beresford et al, 2018a, 2020)
The most numerous data in International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) (2009) were for earthworms and, even for this Reference Animals and Plants (RAPs), data were only available for 17 elements compared to the approximately 40 elements considered in some radiological environmental assessment tools (e.g. Brown et al, 2016)
Summary
Over the last 20 years there has been a step change in international radiological protection, requiring assessment of environmental (i.e. wildlife) impacts of ionizing radiation releases rather than assuming that protecting humans ensures protection of other species (ICRP, 2007; IAEA, 2014a). Various assessment models have been developed to estimate radiation exposure and risk to wildlife (e.g. Beresford et al, 2008a; Brown et al, 2016). These models require an approach to estimate radionuclide activity concentration in organisms if this is unknown (Beresford et al, 2008b). Compilations of CRwo-media values have been published by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, 2014b) and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP, 2009). This paper describes a study conducted in 2015–2016 to sample terrestrial wildlife and associated soil samples from two forest sites in north-eastern England (Fig. 1) sampled using a similar protocol to that described in Barnett et al (2014) and subsequently adopted by Guillén et al (2018) and Beresford et al (2020) for samplings in Spain and Ukraine. The complete dataset associated with this study is available from https://doi.org/10. 5285/8f85c188-a915-46ac-966a-95fcb1491be (Barnett et al, 2020)
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