metal absorption lines, including which is a tracer of DLAs [@RTN06]. For $z>0.11$, the $\lambda \lambda 2796, 2803~\text{\AA}$ doublet falls in the optical spectral region, where it is an efficient proxy for damped absorbers [e.g. @Ellison2006; @Berg2017]. Our sample is therefore selected from a set of sub-DLA and DLAs with reliable HST column-density measurements, initially identified as strong absorbers.

A large fraction of our targeted absorbers are located at redshifts $z \sim 0.7$, originating from the redshift distribution of the imaging campaigns from which they were drawn.[^1] The distribution peaking at this value reflects the tradeoff between (i) a lower number density of LLS, sub-DLAs and DLAs towards low redshift [@RTN06; @Zafar2013a]; and (ii) an increased limiting luminosity towards higher redshifts which prevents the identification of candidate absorbing galaxies from photometric redshift methods [@Rao2011].

We target standard diagnostic nebulae lines in emission to characterise the galaxies, which allow direct comparison of the absorbing galaxies to scaling relations derived from deep imaging surveys of luminosity-selected samples at similar redshifts [@Savaglio2005; @Maiolino2008; @Karim2011; @Stott2014; @Whitaker2014].

VLT FORS2 data {#sec:FORS2data}
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Long-slit spectra were taken in nine slit-alignments.[^2] The log of observations for the different fields, including slit configuration and average seeing-conditions measured 