Mid- to late-Holocene land-use change and lake development at Dallund Sø, Denmark: Study aims, natural and cultural setting, chronology and soil erosion history

Dallund Sø, a lake on the island of Funen, Denmark, is positioned in a landscape that has been heavily impacted by human activities and land-use change over thousands of years. In 1998 a project was initiated to utilize a variety of palaeoecological analyses to investigate lake response to changing land use through the period of agricultural impact on the Danish landscape, i.e., the last 6000 years. This paper describes the overall aims of the study, the natural and cultural setting, sediment core collection, sampling and physical properties, the chronology and erosion history. The long-term changes in the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem are assessed in the following papers in this Research set using (i) pollen, (ii) diatoms, macrofossils and Pediastrum and (iii) zooplankton. These papers are followed by a synthesis paper focusing on the linkage between land-use change and lake development.