Reconstructing Holocene land-use change and sediment budgets in the Rhine system

2) during the period of agriculture, and includes research groups from archeology, geomorphology and historical geography. Sediment budget approaches represent the central analytical framework for understanding the complex forcing-response relationships in the Rhine system. In order to quantitatively link sediment transfer along the sediment cascade with human activities, new methods of quantifying human impact have been sought. A further key element has been the development of spatio-temporal scaling methodologies through the regionalization of local casestudies of human and climatic drivers. The general objectives (cf. Dikau et al., 2005) of the subprojects are: • Regionalization and quantifi cation of htorical land use and settlement data for the last 1,000 years. • Estimation of past population density and land use demand between the 6th millennium BC and the 7th century AD from archeological and palynological data. • Modeling of Holocene human-impacted sediment budgets and fl uxes at diff erent spatial and temporal scales.