210Pb-dated historical lake sediment metal concentrations from Norfolk, UK (mid-19th century to 2009)

Sediment cores were collected by boat and coring equipment prior to project start. Sediment intervals were measured for water content, organic content and carbonate content by heating and combustion (loss-on-ignition). 210Pb dating and other radionuclides were measured on subsamples from core intervals by gamma spectroscopy at the UCL Environmental Radiometric Facility. Water content, organic content, carbonate content and 210Pb dating were measured for a number of student and research reports (unpublished) that in some cases led to being published. Previous workers efforts are gratefully acknowledged. For each lake the report/dissertation/publication is listed in Supplemental Information by WBID and Core Name.
WBID is the waterbody number allocated to lakes from a GIS-based inventory developed by University College London and the UK Centre of Ecology & Hydrology in 2004 (Hughes et al. 2004). The UK Lakes Portal (https://eip.ceh.ac.uk/apps/lakes/) contains details of over 40,000 lakes across the UK. Core names are a four letter abbreviation (usually) of the site name and a distinguishing number. Core coding is managed by the UCL Geography in-house core database Amphora.
New concentrations of elements for NERC Hydroscape were measured in 2016 on archived sediments from these previously collected cores. Sediments were extracted from the UCL Geography Dried Sediment archive. Milled samples of sediment were measured by X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy using an Energy dispersive XRF (Bruker Ltd) with standard reference sediments prepared and run with the core samples. Mercury (total) was measured on subsamples by cold-vapour fluorescence spectroscopy (CV-AFS). Sediment core element concentrations measured by XRF and CV-AFS were measured with laboratory blanks and standard reference sediment samples.