These concepts are essential to understanding why anthropogenic sediment is

selleck compound located where it is, how it behaved over the Anthropocene, and how it may behave in the future. The concept of inheriting a legacy from the past is pervasive in the environmental science literature, and LS is a logical outgrowth of that perspective. Over the first decade of the new millennium, the term, legacy sediment (LS) began to be used with increasing frequency in a variety of contexts. A partial Internet sample of published scientific papers or reports that contain the phrase ‘legacy sediment’ indicates that use of the term has proliferated, especially in the eastern USA, and across a range of disciplines including geomorphology, hydrology, ecology, environmental toxicology, and planning ( Table 1). The earliest occurrence of the term was in 2004 and was concerned with the effects of copper contamination from legacy sediment on water quality ( Novotny, 2004). By 2007, LS had appeared in several studies of historical alluvium in the eastern USA. The use of LS to describe historical floodplain alluvium increased greatly with

the findings of legacy mill-pond surveys in Pennsylvania, USA ( Walter and Afatinib mouse Merritts, 2008 and Merritts et al., 2011). Although these two publications do not use the phrase, it was used by the authors and others as early as 2005 in abstracts and field trip logs in association with sediment trapped in legacy mill ponds. The use

of ‘legacy sediment’ in publications grew at about the same time as the use of ‘legacy contaminants’ and ‘legacy pollution.’ An Internet search of publications with the phrases “legacy contam*” and “legacy pollut*” in Wiley Online and Science Direct indicate a much larger number of uses of those terms than LS, but a similar—perhaps slightly earlier—timing of rapid growth ( Fig. 1). The contexts in which LS is used in publications vary widely from sources of legacy contaminations in toxicological studies (Bay et al., 2012), to sediment budgets (Gellis et al., 2009), Buspirone HCl to fluvial geomorphic and ecological processes (Hupp et al., 2009). This paper examines questions of geographic location, age, stratigraphic nomenclature, and genetic processes, in an attempt to clarify the concept of LS and avoid vague, obscure, or conflicting uses of the term. Ultimately, a definition of LS is suggested with broad applicability to sedimentary bodies generated by anthropogenic depositional episodes. Much usage of the term LS has gone without an explicit definition and relies on preconceived understandings or implications that may vary between disciplines. The primary implied meanings apparently are the historical age or the anthropogenic origin of the sediment. One consideration in defining LS is to examine the etymology of legacy.