EGU21-9168, updated on 21 Jun 2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-9168
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Impact of urban development on waterbodies during medieval and early modern ages in Bad Waldsee (Germany)

Kristin Haas1, Kim J. Krahn2, Sara Saeidi Ghavi Andam3, Rik Tjallingii4, Matthias Hinderer1, Elena Marinova3, Manfred Rösch3, and Antje Schwalb2
Kristin Haas et al.
  • 1Institute of Applied Geosciences, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Schnittspahnstrasse 9, 64287 Darmstadt, Germany (haas@geo.tu-darmstadt.de)
  • 2Institute of Geosystems and Bioindication, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Langer Kamp 19c, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
  • 3Landesamt für Denkmalpflege im Regierungspräsidium Stuttgart, Fischersteig 9, 78343 Gaienhofen-Hemmenhofen, Germany
  • 4Helmholtz Centre Potsdam GFZ, Section Climate Dynamics and Landscape Evolution, Telegrafenberg, 14473 Potsdam, Germany

Seasonally laminated lacustrine sediments of Lake Stadtsee, located in the city of Bad Waldsee (Southern Germany), offer a continuous archive that allows a unique and yearly correlation of sedimentary signals and historic documents since medieval times. Comparison of the economic and environmental history of an urban centre will provide detailed insight into how the history of a city and its periphery region affected lake development and water quality, and how fast water quality and aquatic ecosystem recovered from human impact and activities. An interdisciplinary research team consisting of geologists, biologists, and historians from various universities and institutions has been established and started its work recently. The common goal of the different working groups and disciplines is to investigate temporally highly resolved sediment records of diatom and pollen spectra, geochemical proxies, and sediment facies of profundal sediment cores from Lake Stadtsee and to compare and calibrate these results with historic documents, stock books, archive records, dendrochronology records, and maps. So far, continuous geochemical sediment records of Lake Stadtsee were acquired non-destructively using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) core scanning. These element intensity records of the major elements (e.g. Al, Si, K, Ca, Ti, Fe) were measured every 2 mm. Sampling and subsequent analyses (e.g. pollen, PAH, isotopes) are ongoing.

Overall, the environmental impact of socio-economic development for the preindustrial development phase of a city from AD 1200 to 1800 will be assessed for the first time. The research will focus on the effects of population growth or decrease, farming intensity, economic production, trade activity in relation to environmental, and climate change, including catastrophic events such as fires and floods. The results will provide important insights about the response of urban surface waters to changing emissions of the city and the long-term behaviour of persistent pollutants on lakes. The project will thereby contribute to the knowledge of historic human impact on the environment in Germany, pre-medieval reference conditions, and the limits of resilience of aquatic systems. Thus, it will target the past environmental footprint of anthropogenic induced events on urbanized lake ecosystems and help to understand the mechanism behind such processes in the future.

How to cite: Haas, K., Krahn, K. J., Saeidi Ghavi Andam, S., Tjallingii, R., Hinderer, M., Marinova, E., Rösch, M., and Schwalb, A.: Impact of urban development on waterbodies during medieval and early modern ages in Bad Waldsee (Germany), EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-9168, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-9168, 2021.

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