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Agricultural land, and arable farming in particular, is commonly associated with increased soil erosion risk. Such systems are most vulnerable during low groundcover periods, but downstream delivery is ultimately controlled by connectivity. This study provides a catchment‐scale sediment budget integrating three discrete but complementary investigations spanning different temporal and spatial scales. The first gives details on suspended sediment fluxes at the catchment outlet (2009–2012). The second provenances sources of fluxes using quantitative sediment fingerprinting. The third sets recent data in a multidecadal (60‐year) context using radiometric (137Cs) field‐scale soil loss estimates. The catchment observatory (11 km2) is low relief with predominantly well‐drained soils and dominated by spring‐sown cereal cropping through the study period. Modelling 137Cs inventory losses across 30 fields provided a catchment‐wide mean soil loss of 2.0 Mg ha−1 yr−1. Although such rates are not atypical of intensively managed agriculture across Europe, they are considerably higher than contemporary sediment export yields of 0.12 Mg ha−1 yr−1 of which fingerprinting revealed that contemporary slope erosion contributed less than 25% (0.03 Mg ha−1 yr−1). No evidence of floodplain or in‐channel sediment storage was consistent with disconnectivity. Instead, it is hypothesised that soil loss is associated with coextraction from root crop harvesting of previously widespread sugar beet crops. Considering that the highest mass‐specific 137Cs concentration occurred during the 1960s, there appears to have been significant depletion of the cumulative 137Cs inventory where root crop harvesting occurred as compared with atmospheric fallout 'reference sites.' The study highlights the value of multiple methodologies when seeking to understand legacy issues within agricultural catchment settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Lakes are major repositories of biodiversity, provide multiple ecosystem services and are widely recognised as key indicators of environmental change. However, studies of lake response to drivers of change at a pan-European scale are exceptionally rare. The need for such studies has been given renewed impetus by concerns over environmental change and because of international policies, such as the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), which impose legal obligations to monitor the condition of European lakes towards sustainable systems with good ecological status. This has highlighted the need for methods that can be widely applied across large spatial and temporal scales and produce comparable results. Remote sensing promises much in terms of information provision, but the spatial transferability and temporal repeatability of methods and relationships observed at individual or regional case studies remains unproven at the continental scale. This study demonstrates that NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) thermal data are capable of producing highly accurate (R2 >0.9) lake surface temperature (LST) estimates in lakes with variable hydromorphological characteristics and contrasting thermal regimes. Validation of the approach using archived AVHRR thermal data for Lake Geneva produced observations that were consistent with field data for equivalent time periods. This approach provides the basis for generalizing temporal and spatial trends in European lake surface temperature over several decades and confirms the potential of the full 30year NOAA AVHRR archive to can provide AVHRR-derived LST estimates to help inform European policies on lake water quality. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]