The devastating nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan occurred in 2011. Nine years later, wildlife populations have returned to the areas affected by the catastrophe. Researchers at the University of Georgia recently performed a camera study published in the Journal of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. They took more than 267,000 wildlife pictures of the landscape, showing that more than 20 species have returned to the area, including raccoon dogs, pheasants, foxes, Japanese hares, wild boars, red foxes, weasels, sika deer, black bears, masked palm civets, and macaques.

According to James Beasley, a wildlife biologist and associate professor at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory at the University of Georgia, both the public and the scientific community have inquired as to the whereabouts and livelihoods of wildlife in the years following nuclear accidents such as those in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

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, Beasley remarked in a press release. He stated that the species most commonly seen in the photos from the study, like wild boars, typically come into conflict with humans. This suggests these species have increased in abundance following the evacuation of people, he explained.

To effectively study Fukushima, Beasleys team worked with Professor Thomas Hinton at the Institute of Environmental Radioactivity at Fukushima University to split the landscape into three zones by contamination level: the highest where humans were completely excluded, intermediate where humans were restricted, and low radiation where humans were permitted to inhabit. These designations were largely based on those established by the Japanese government following the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe.

Cameras captured pictures of the landscape over 120 days. Over 26,000 of these images were from the uninhabited area, about 13,000 were from the restricted area, and roughly 7,000 were from the inhabited area. An overwhelming 46,000 of the photos contained wild boars. A few other species that were more common in the uninhabited and restricted zones were raccoons, Japanese marten, and Japanese macaque.

The control zone for the research was the uninhabited zone since no data was recorded on wildlife populations in the evacuated areas. This was ideal as it was close to the human-inhabited zone and had a similar landscape. The researchers also investigated how variables such as vegetation type and elevation affect wildlife populations.

The terrain varies from mountainous to coastal habitats, and we know these habitats support different types of species. To account for these factors, we incorporated habitat and landscape attributes such as elevation into our analysis, Beasley noted. Based on these analyses, our results show that level of human activity, elevation, and habitat type were the primary factors influencing the abundance of the species evaluated, rather than radiation levels.

Although the activity pattern of most species was similar to that of their activity pattern in other regions, wild boars were more active in the day than other wild boars in human-inhabited areas were. Researchers speculate that they are changing their behavior due to the lack of humans. Japanese serow also appear to be changing their behavior; they usually avoid humans, but the photos showed that they were often present in rural regions inhabited by humans. This behavior is likely a reaction to the increasing population of boar in the uninhabited zone.

While this study does not attempt to accurately assess an individual animals health, Hinton said, [it] makes an important contribution because it examines radiological impacts to populations of wildlife, whereas most previous studies have looked for effects to individual animals.

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Nearly a decade later, animal life has returned to Fukushima - CMU The Tartan Online