“…As regards the most significant of the short-lived radionuclides, 131,133 I, the main contamination route for vegetation is by air. Therefore, until recently, relatively little attention was paid to studies of soil-to-plant transfer of radioiodine (Prister et al, 1977;Tikhomirov et al, 1980;Tikhomirov, 1983;Kashin, 1987), and iodine's behaviour in soil (Prister et al, 1977;Prokhorov et al, 1978;Katagiri et al, 1997;Sheppard et al, 1992Sheppard et al, , 1995Muramatsu and Yoshida, 1996;Ashworth et al, 2003). Understanding its behaviour is important in order to understand not only the radioecological effects, but also iodine's radiogeochemistry since this element is among the most important of the microelements necessary to organisms (Whitehead, 1984;Evans and Hammad, 1995).…”