Conceptual overview of forestland - a model to interpret and predict temporal and spatial patterns of radioactively contaminated forest landscapes

摘要

Forested area contaminated with radioactive substances are characterized by an extremely high spatial variability of radionuclide levels.The horizontal and vertical patterns of the radioactive contamination may also show substantial changes with time,especially during the first days and months after the deposition.Furthermore,the effective ecological half-lives tend to be very long in some forest components.The contamination level of a specific forest component at a specific time and location is due to multiple factors and processes interacting in a complex way.The extrapolation of measured activity levels in space and time can,therefore,often not be done by common statistical methods or by using simple heuristic relationships.A conceivable approach to solve this prblem is to combine the capacity of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for management and representation of large anounts of data with the generalization possibilities of dynamic ecosystem models.Here we give a conceptual overview of a forest ecosystem model (FORESTLAND) that could be used for this purpose.In particular,we present some features important for a future coupling with GIS.