Soil-to-plant transfer of fallout caesium and strontium in Austrian lowland and Alpine pastures

The areal contamination, the depth distributions in the soil and the soil-to-plant transferfactors were determined for `Cs and '°Sr at four Austrian pastures. Two of these are intensively used lowland pastures at about 500 m above sea level. and the other two are Alpine pastures at 1600 and 1300 m. At the latter, the vertical migration velocity in the soil is slower and the soil-to-plant transfer is significantly higher than at the lowland pastures (for both nuchdes). A strong positive correlation exists between the `3'Cs and e"Sr soil-to-plant transfers, indicating that some of the parameters typical of Alpine environments have a similar effect an the plant uptake of these fallout nuclides, c.g. low biological activity in the soil and short vegetation periods.