Division 3, Soil Use and Management

Who

Takashi Kosaki, Chair, Division 3

What

International Union for Quaternary Research, XIX Congress (INQUA Congress 2015)

When & Where

July 26 through August 2, 2015, Nagoya Congress Center, Nagoya, Japan

Soil Message

Once every four years, Quaternary researchers from all over the world meet at the INQUA Congress to exchange the latest research results and develop agendas for the years to come. In 2015, the Congress took place in Nagoya, Japan. The Congress had 1,790 participants from 68 countries and regions (http://inqua2015.jp/index.htm). IUSS held for the first time in the congresses the following session below for promoting soils research activities in the community of Quaternary researchers.
Takashi Kosaki, Chair of Division 3 together with Professors Hirofumi Tshukada, Fukushima University, Japan and Edward R. Landa, University of Maryland, USA, and others convened the session entitled “Biosphere contaminated with artificial and natural
radionuclides”. Landa gave a plenary lecture entitled “Mineral hosts and microbial processes: A biogeochemical perspective on naturally occurring radioactive materials in the surficial environment” and 5 oral and 11 poster papers were presented from USA, Japan, France, China and Korea. Topics covered in this session include spatio-temporal monitoring, dynamics in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and mechanism of the movement of radionuclides such as Pu, Cs, I, Sr and Tc.
Those who presented oral and poster papers were not only soil scientists but also geoscientists, marine scientists, chemists, etc. and thus this session was considered to have succeeded in providing the forum for people in a variety of backgrounds gathering and sharing their idea and collaborating each other towards the solution of Fukushima issues in a multidisciplinary approach.