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birchbarkcanoe  ·  2024 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Chernobyl Disaster May Have Also Built a Paradise

Oooh a good re-hash indeed! I'm so intrigued by the wolf population increase - wolves play a "keystone species" role in so many ecosystems, and a seven-fold increase is pretty significant! I guess the whole ecosystem is on that weird tipping point of "is this a big malformed population or are they reproducing quickly enough to avoid it?"

Also those mapping studies sound FASCINATING. I know their goal is dosage, but I wonder how their general behavioral patterns could be different from, say, a "healthy" wolf-population GPS-track study. (or pick your favorite critter)

And uh...

    climate change-induced radioactive wildfires.

...what fun things we've brought upon our planet. One of the presentations I gave fairly frequently in my environmental ed job was about the ecological changes brought about by fire, and fires never cease to amaze me (from an ecological perspective, not a pyromaniac). I wonder that area was already prone to fire beforehand or if that's yet another repercussion of the radiation? That throws an entirely new variable out there in terms of how the ecosystem maintains itself. Wicked cool!