Unlike other natural landscapes, forest ecosystems have been fulfilling the most important task. Their challenge is to afford vital activity of the population. Forests should accumulate the Chernobyl-derived radionuclides and to prevent them from distributing over the land surface. Having been universally recognized as the greatest industrial calamity of all time, this accident revealed the closest connection between the Human and the Forest that both need protection and improving their health.
To make reliable estimate of the condition of forest ecosystems. their impact on the formation of the radiation dose on population of the radioactively-contaminated areas, and finally to take measures on accelerated rehabilitation of the vast forested areas that have become either totally or partially unfit for human use is impossible without intimate knowledge of migration of radionuclides in the 'soil-plant' system and response of woody plants and forest-derived food-stuffs to different contamination levels.
The monograph written by the researchers of the Forest Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus reports investigation covering the fields of forest management, soil hydrology, genetics, breeding, forest protection, forest economy and engineering carried out under the conditions of the large-scale radioactive contamination.
The Forest Institute is only 120 km away from the nuclear reactor that blew up on April 26, 1986. Therefore immediately after the nuclear accident the researchers started to carry out extensive radiological and radiobiological studies of forest ecosystems. By the time of publication of the monograph nearly all the departments and laboratories of the institute have accumulated a great deal of experimental material and data that are systematized and presented in the current monograph.
The researchers of the Forest Institute continue an active search for lines of attack on the Chernobyl problems. How to manage forests occurring on radioactively-contaminated areas? Is it possible to grow stands with the regulated radionuclide contents? And finally, what is the response of a human organism to a forest contaminated by radionuclides? A practitioner, a researcher and a student will find the answers to these and many other questions in the monograph.
The authors wish to thank the official reviewers, academician of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Prof. A.I. Pisarenko and academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Prof. E.F. Konoplia for their careful reading, critical comments and helpful suggestions on the monograph.
The authors would like to thank warmly the UNESCO management for rendering support in publication of the monograph.
Thanks are also due to E.V. Aksamitova for computer setting of the monograph and E. F. Guseva for her translation.