Dr. Heleny Florou Dr Florou, Head of the Environmental Radioactivity Laboratory (ERL), which is a functional unit of INRASTES, has an over 35-year experience in environmental radioactivity and radioecology, focused in the marine environment and the development of new tools for the comparative radiological assessment of radioactive and conventional pollutants, based on the impact level of natural populations.
Personal Page: http://www.ipta.demokritos.gr/hflorou
Several tools have been used for the radionuclide inventory in the terrestrial and aquatic environment, while the radioecological research has resulted to innovation in technology for pollutant recording and impact assessment. Such tools are based on inter-disciplinary approaches in order to face new challenges (e.g. remote pollutant inventory, modelling for deep sea radionuclide detection, eco-centric impact assessment).
The environmental quality assessment is a complicated issue usually faced by different viewpoints depending on the pollutants and focused on anthropocentric approach. Besides, the synergism of the several environmental stressors cannot be reliably estimated, as the apportionment of each pollutant is approximated at the monitoring level (the dose rates are also based on the pollutant levels of the environmental components either abiotic and organisms), whereas the eco-centric approach, posed combatively by ecologists, are neglected, because of the excessive cost. Therefore, a comprehensive but harmonized tool for the evaluation of the good environmental status, either for humans’ and non-humans’ welfare is an urgent need under the nowadays challenges of environmentalists, as the lack of the appropriate information usually results to overestimation of the technological risk assessment. This tool must be flexible, sensitive with its science-supported mechanism good enough popularized, whereas it has to give a comprehensive answer about the radioactive contamination impact on life-forms integrated to the various levels of ecosystem organization but in comparison to the conventional pollution impact and their apportionment respectively.