The concept of ‘Man as a geological agent’ in the Anthropocene, leading to profound changes (e.g. biodiversity, climate, land and water degradation) in the Earth's surface processes, is now widely accepted beyond the Earth Science community.
Environmental pollution and degradation are expected to intensify in the coming decades as pressure on terrestrial ecosystems and hydrosystems increases in the context of climate change.
The retro-observation of environmental responses to human disturbance can help to promote more responsible and sustainable land and water resources management policies in the future. The collection and multidisciplinary analysis of recently deposited sediments in lakes, dam reservoirs, and fluvial systems provide a unique and powerful tool for learning from the past to retrospectively reconstruct the inertia, trajectories, and resilience of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to anthropogenic forcing.
In this session, we invite studies that examine sediment dynamics perturbed by human activities over the past few centuries to recent decades. We encourage contributions showing the consequences of human-induced land use changes (e.g. deforestation, agricultural expansion), pollutant releases (e.g. metals, organic substances, microplastics), changes in biodiversity, etc., in particular those developing innovative methods and proxies applied to recent sediment records to understand better the impacts of these activities on land/water resources at different spatial and temporal scales.