The effect of forest fire on the radiocesium inventory of tree bark and surface soil in ‘difficult-to-return zone’

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the effect of forest fire on radiocesium (RCs: ¹³⁴Cs and ¹³⁷Cs) status in forest ecosystem, in Japanese red pine forest on the ridge area and Japanese cedar forest on the riparian zone in Mt. Juman, where a forest fire occurred on 29^th April to 10^th May in 2017. In both the forests, we sampled bark on the burned side as well as from the non-burned side of the same tree trunk, along with samples from organic layer and mineral surface soil in burned areas and those from adjacent non-burned areas. We analyzed RCs concentrations in each specimen. Lower value for the concentration and the inventory of RCs was observed for the biomass in burned bark in Japanese red pine. The RCs concentration of organic layer was also lower in burned area than in adjacent non-burned area in all specimens from Japanese red pine forest and Japanese cedar forest.