The onset and impact of industrialization revealed from urban lake sediments. Bot_garden

The onset of industrialization and its impact on human health remains debated1. This is because information largely comes from historical written records that primarily contains socio-political descriptions and thus do not provide a comprehensive environmental history2-5. Therefore, it is essential to have an independent means for reconstructing pollution and disease levels around the time of industrialization. Here, we demonstrate how heavy metals, black carbon (BC), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and environmental DNA (eDNA) in lake sediments can be used to track pollution and disease levels over the last 360 years in one major European capital city, Copenhagen (Denmark).