- 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 or wildlife sub-category).
- 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.
- Wood et al. proposed 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.
- To enable others to be able to conduct similar analyses of summarised data sets the authors have made the SPREADSHEET with macro's available.
Overview
Content Tools
Bookmarks
