What happens to the environment when humans disappear? Thirty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, booming populations of wolf, elk and other wildlife in the vast contaminated zone in Belarus and Ukraine provide a clue.
On April 26, 1986, a botched test at the nuclear plant in Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, sent clouds of smouldering radioactive material across large swathes of Europe.
Here, a white-tailed eagle lands on a wolf's carcass in the abandoned village of Dronki in Belarus.
Over 100,000 people had to abandon the area permanently, leaving native animals the sole occupants of a cross-border "exclusion zone" roughly the size of Luxembourg.
The long-term impact of the radiation on animal populations is a subject of intense debate because scientists have struggled to untangle the positive effects of human absence from the negative effects of living in a poisoned environment.
In March, Vronska said authorities were considering turning the uninhabitable zone into a biosphere to protect and study its native animal populations in what would be the largest nature reserve in Europe.
There are also plans to use parts of the area to store nuclear waste and for solar power.