30 Years After Chernobyl, Nature Is Thriving | National Geographic

The large reason why these animals seem to be persisting in high densities or a high abundance within the exclusion zone is because of the absence of humans. It's absolutely normal. As you drive around the exclusion zone, you're overcome by all the lush nature. It's really an eerie reminder of the tragic human impact that occurred there back around 30 years ago.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is basically a 30 km radius that was created that extends around the nuclear reactor where the accident occurred. Within that 30 km zone, that's where preventive measures were taken to exclude people. So all the towns, villages, cities within that area, that 30 km area, were evacuated.

Thirty years after the accident, this woodland has increased up to one and a half or more times. So now approximately 70% of the area is under the forest. If you talk about large mammals like carnivores and ungulates, it's really good habitat because it's a wild territory now, and especially this very wild spot along the border with Belarus.

Also, many different water sources are like lakes and rivers and springs. The work that we've been involved with in the Chernobyl exclusion zone has been to look at the distribution and relative abundance of wildlife, particularly large mammals, and especially carnivores, specifically looking at radiation contaminations.

So as you move from areas of low to high contamination, do you see a subsequent drop-off in the number of species that you detect, the relative abundance of those animals? The species we most commonly documented were raccoon dogs, large numbers of photographs of gray wolves, red fox, Eurasian boar, and Eurasian badger.

When we have human-dominated landscapes, we have lower densities of animals, especially animals that come into conflict with humans like wolves. After people were removed, even though the landscape was highly contaminated, it allowed them to increase.

What this research is not looking at is the individual health of those animals. So it doesn't suggest that these animals are incredibly healthy, although on the surface, they appear very healthy. It doesn't imply that there aren't more subtle genetic effects, and that's an important area that I think we need to continue to explore with future research down the road.