Tracing pollution and recovery using sediments in an urban estuary, northern Baltic Sea: Are we far from ecological reference conditions?
One of the primary challenges of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) of the European Union is to provide a guide for the recovery of surface waters from pollution. However, few studies deal with reference conditions according to the WFD in coastal waters. Using the urbanised Laajalahti Bay (Helsinki, Finland) as an example, reference conditions and pollution history were defined using the stratigr