Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

 

 

  • Concentration ratios (CRwo-media) are used in most radioecological models to predict radionuclide activity concentrations in wildlife from those in environmental media. 
  • This simplistic approach amalgamates the various factors influencing transfer within a single generic value and, as a result, comparisons of model predictions with site-specific measurements can vary by orders of magnitude.  To improve model predictions, the development of ‘condition-specific’ CRwo-media values has been proposed (e.g. for a specific habitat).  However, the underlying datasets for most CRwo-media value databases, such as the wildlife transfer database

...

  • developed within the IAEA EMRAS II programme, include summarised data. This presents challenges for the calculation and subsequent statistical evaluation of condition-specific CRwo-media values.  A further complication is the common use of arithmetic summary statistics to summarise data in source references, even though CRwo-media values generally tend towards a lognormal distribution and should be summarised using geometric statistics.  In this paper, we propose a statistically-defensible and robust method for reconstructing underlying datasets to calculate condition-specific CRwo-media values from summarised data and deriving appropriate summary statistics.