Quaternary palaeoecology was initiated as a new research field at the Earth Science department with the appointment of Bent Odgaard by June 2002. Research interests include the relationship between vegetational diversity and diversity of sedimentary pollen assemblages as well as Holocene palaeoecological and palaeoclimatic studies with high time resolution using laminated (varved) sediments. Research related to land-use / land-cover is especially focusing on efforts to estimate land-cover over the last 2000 years from pollen records. This approach is developed in a multidisciplinary group of reseachers (AGRAR 2000 project http://www1.natmus.dk/agrar2000/).