Chornobyl, the accidental nature reserve

Man is more deadly to wildlife than a nuclear disaster, according to new research that has found animal populations in the Chornobyl exclusion zone have unexpectedly soared 30 years after the world's worst nuclear accident.

Land surrounding Chornobyl — which was evacuated after the catastrophic 1986 nuclear accident — is now teeming with elk, deer and wolves.

About 116,000 people were evacuated from a 4,000- square- kilometre zone around Chornobyl, on the border of Ukraine and Belarus, after the nuclear power plant there exploded.

An exclusion zone remains closed to human habitation, and researchers believe the lack of humans has led to a thriving populations of wild mammals — despite the high radiation levels.

The report, published in Current Biology, used helicopter surveys of animal tracks in fresh snow to trace the population of wildlife in the exclusion zone.

They found that rarer species including European lynx, which were previously absent, have returned to the area.

They also documented a European brown bear in the exclusion zone, a species not believed to have been seen in the area for nearly a century.

Meanwhile other large species including wild boar, roe deer, and fox were thriving, while the wolf population was several times higher than in comparable, non- contaminated nature reserves.

“In purely environmental terms, if you take the terrible things that happened to the human population out of the equation, as far as we can see at this stage, the accident hasn't done serious environmental damage,” said professor Jim Smith of Portsmouth University in England, one of the study's authors.