Alain N Rousseau

National Institute of Scientific Research | INRS · Eau Terre Environnement Centre

The role of trees in watershed hydrology is governed by many environmental factors along with their inherent characteristics and not surprisingly has generated diverse debates in the literature. Herein, this conceptual meta-analysis provides an opportunity to propose a conceptual model for understanding the role of trees in watershed hydrology a...

Stand-off pads are uncovered outdoor yards built with absorbent materials, where cattle can be raised to minimize the environmental impact associated with nutrient runoff and gas emissions from manure management. Consequently, they emerge as a prospective alternative to traditional wintering pens, facilitating movement opportunities for dairy cows...

Geographically isolated wetlands (GIWs) offer a diverse array of ecosystem services and contribute largely to landscape functions. Numerous studies have documented the substantial pressures on wetland ecosystems from both natural changes and human activities worldwide. However, the quantification of these impacts on GIWs remains scarce. This study...

The role of trees in watershed hydrology is governed by many environmental factors along with their inherent characteristics and not surprisingly has generated into diverse debates in the literature. Herein, this state-of-the-art review provides an opportunity to propose a conceptual model for understanding the role of trees in watershed hydrology...

Agricultural water uses and management is ongoingly being influenced by several highly complex economic, engineering, social, hydrologic, environmental, and even political factors. The intricate and interwoven nature of these factors makes it quite challenging to cope with when considering the anticipated impacts of climate change and socio-economi...

Climate change has substantially impacted global runoff patterns and biodiversity, yet the response of river biodiversity to future runoff changes remains unclear. Here, we project and characterize this evolution by calculating the Shannon index (SI), a measure of river biodiversity, for 32 major rivers worldwide under future climate scenarios. We...

Geographically isolated wetlands (GIWs) provide a portfolio of ecosystem services and contribute largely to landscape functions. Several studies have found that increasing pressure induced by climate change and anthropogenic activities on wetlands ecosystems have been significant around the world. Yet few studies have quantified the impact of natur...

This paper presents the extension of the monolayer snow model of a semi-distributed hydrological model (HYDROTEL) to a multilayer model that considers snow to be a combination of ice and air, while accounting for freezing rain. For two stations in Yukon and one station in northern Quebec, Canada, the multilayer model achieves high performances duri...

Considering ecosystem services (ESs) in conservation planning represents a growing interest in global standards. However, this task has been hindered by the complexity of the ecological and socio-economic attributes of ESs, and questions remain, such as how to incorporate the demand for ESs, and ensure equity among beneficiary groups. To successful...

This paper discusses the primary processes involved in the degradation of cultivated organic soils (Histosols) in Canada: decomposition, subsidence, formation of a compacted horizon limiting drainage and last, but not least, wind erosion. The content is organized as follows: (i) description and quantification of the different mechanisms, (ii) overv...

The hydrological processes of cascading hydroelectric reservoirs differ from those of lakes, due to the importance of the inflows and outflows that vary with energy demand. These heat and water advection terms are rarely considered in water body energy balance analyses even though reservoirs are common man-made infrastructures, especially in North...

Study region: Two southern Quebec (Canada) watersheds were used to validate the proposed method for delineating inundated areas of small watersheds: the 554-km2 St.Charles and the 133 km2 À la Raquette watersheds. Observed data from six-gauge stations were used to validate the Synthetic Rating Curves (SRC) developed in the study. Study focus: This...

A 3D hydrodynamic model (EFDC) was applied to simulate dissolved oxygen (DO) and temperature (T) (two crucial parameters impacting water quality) throughout Lake St. Charles, a rural-urban shallow lake located North of Quebec City, Canada. Model outputs of T and DO corroborate observations at five monitoring stations within the lake. Simulated resu...

Wetlands and reservoirs are important water flow and storage regulators in a river basin; therefore, they can play a crucial role in mitigating flood and hydrological drought risks. Despite the advancement of river basin theory and modeling, our knowledge is still limited about the extent to which these two regulators could perform such a role, esp...

Wetlands and reservoirs are important water flow and storage regulators in a river basin; therefore, they can play a crucial role in mitigating flood and hydrological drought risks. Despite the advancement of river basin theory and modeling, our knowledge is still limited about the extent to which these two regulators could perform such a role, esp...

The profound impact of soil temperature (TS) on crucial environmental processes, including water infiltration, subsurface movement, plant growth, and its influence on land–atmosphere dynamics, cannot be undermined. While satellite and land surface model-based data are valuable in data-sparse areas, they necessitate innovative solutions to bridge ga...

Woodchips in stand-off pads for wintering cows have been applied in countries like Ireland and New Zealand. Their primary role is to protect soils by effectively filtering nutrients during wet conditions, while ensuring a healthy and comfortable environment for the cows. The stand-off pad concept has the potential to be adopted in Canada to provide...

Volume II of this Research Topic calls for papers on scientific and practical development related to the application of Hydroinformatics for agricultural water management. The potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following: • Data acquisition systems and tools for spatio-temporal crop water stress monitoring. • Emerging approache...

The thermal regime of hydroelectric reservoirs differs from that of lakes, as it is influenced not only by natural inflows and outflows of energy, but also by management rules through regulated downstream constraints and more importantly the electric demand through turbine flows. These advection terms are rarely assessed for hydroelectric reservoir...

Recently, it has been demonstrated that the use of lagged discharge in long short-term memory (LSTM) networks represents an effective method for streamflow prediction, so-called, data integration (DI). However, it is uncertain if a transfer learning (TL) model, which did not include recent discharge when trained on the source region, can reap the b...

The hydrological regulation services provided by wetlands have great potential to be used as a nature-based solution for improving basin resilience to hydrological extremes. However, the efficiency of wetlands in attenuating hydrological extremes and how this attenuation efficiency varies with the location and type of wetland are not well understoo...

Water bodies such as lakes and reservoirs affect the regional climate by acting as heat sinks and sources through the evaporation of substantial quantities of water over several months of the year. Unfortunately, energy exchange observations between deep reservoirs and the atmosphere remain rare in northeastern North America, which has one of the h...

How much wetland we should protect or restore is not a simple question, such that conservation targets are often set according to political agendas, then standardized globally. However, given their key regulating hydrological functions, wetlands represent nature-based solutions to the anticipated, exacerbating effect of climate change on drought an...

Wetlands have been singled out as a potential nature-based solution for improving the resilience and reducing the risks of hydrometeorological extremes. However, whether and to what extent wetlands can affect hydrological droughts is not well understood. To fill this gap, we proposed a general framework to discern the effect of wetlands on: (i) the...

The control of pathogens is of great importance to maintaining safe water quality for animal consumption and reducing the spread of pathogens in the environment and throughout the production chain. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is an attractive nanoparticle for disinfection purposes because it is easy to use, highly effective under UV radiation and cost...

Water bodies such as lakes and reservoirs affect the regional climate by acting as heat sinks and sources through the evaporation of substantial quantities of water over several months of the year. Unfortunately, energy exchange observations between inland water bodies and the atmosphere remain rare in northeastern North America, which has one of t...

Observations of turbulent heat fluxes over inland water bodies are scarce despite being critical to adequate lake parametrization for numerical weather forecast and climate models. Scintillometry has allowed for the regional (~ km²) estimation of turbulent heat fluxes, but few studies have assessed its performance over water. We compare scintillome...

During summer and winter months, pastures and outdoor pens represent the conventional means of providing exercise for dairy cows housed in tie-stall barns in the province of Québec, Canada. Unfortunately, outdoor pens require large spaces, and their leachates do not meet Québec’s environmental regulations. Therefore, there is a need to develop alte...

Since 1990, worldwide egg production has increased on average 2.8% per year. This increase has drawn the attention of animal welfare advocates. In Canada, new challenges have emerged, among them: increased awareness in animal welfare and environmental footprint and a shift to cage-free egg production systems (CFSs). Welfare assessment of environmen...

This article proposes an analytical strategy that combines X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) and Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) analysis as an alternative solution to long-term experiments that seek to investigate spatiotemporal variations in soil hydraulic properties induced by drainage and recharge cycles. We conducted CT scanning on 100-cm-high...

Increasing legal requirements by local and regional governments to protect hydrosystems and maintain their hydrological services require nowadays the identification of wetlands of particular interest for conservation. Individual wetlands, however, have a limited effect on these services, especially on stream flow at the watershed scale in general....

The field of Hydroinformatics has evolved from computational hydraulics, a techno-centric endeavor, to currently focus on a whole socio-technical dimension of water resources management. It aims at transforming the social environment around water resources and infrastructures from an individualistically reactive one into an altruistically interacti...

Integrated water management has become a priority for cropping systems where subirrigation is possible. Compared to conventional sprinkler irrigation, the controlling water table can lead to a substantial increase in yield and water use efficiency with less pumping energy requirements. Knowing the spatiotemporal distribution of water table depth (W...

The global scale wetland loss or degeneration triggers the assessment on how their function provisions are likely to change under different management scenarios. However, how and to what extent river damming can modify the hydrological function of wetlands remain largely unknown. In this study, we apply a distributed hydrological modeling platform...

Sparse precipitation information can result in uncertainties in hydrological modelling practices. Precipitation observation network augmentation is one way to reduce the uncertainty. Meanwhile, in basins with snowpack-dominated hydrology, in the absence of a high-density precipitation observation network, assimilation of in situ and remotely sensed...

Agricultural diffuse pollution caused by runoff and soil loss from cropland has been a serious environmental problem in the black soil area of Northeast China. While water and soil conservation measures have led to a sharp decrease in overland flow within source water sub-watersheds, they have, on the other end, affected the water security of agric...

Animal welfare concerns have been a challenging issue for producers and international marketing. In laying hen production, cage-free systems (CFS) have been identified as an alternative to ensure the laying hens’ well-being. Nevertheless, in CFS, important environmental issues have been reported, decreasing indoor air quality. Environmental control...

It is increasingly recognized that water scarcity, rather than a lack of arable land, will be the major constraint to increase agricultural production over the next few decades. Therefore, water represents a unique agricultural asset to drive agricultural sustainability. However, its planning, management and usage are often influenced by a mix of i...

In Nordic watersheds, estimation of the dynamics of snow water equivalent (SWE) represents a major step toward a satisfactory modeling of the annual hydrograph. For a multilayer, physically-based snow model like MASiN (Modèle Autonome de Simulation de la Neige), the number of modeled snow layers can affect the accuracy of the simulated SWE. The obj...

In this paper we first compare three different methods of spatial interpolation, i.e., inverse distance weighting (IDW), thin plate splines (TPS), and kriging on weekly water table depth (WTD) measurements from 80 observation wells in two cranberry farms (Farm A and Farm B) located in Québec, Canada. We use the leave-one-out cross-validation approa...

The applicability of the Canadian Precipitation Analysis products known as the Regional Deterministic Precipitation Analysis (CaPA-RDPA) for hydrological modelling in boreal watersheds in Canada, which are constrained with shortage of precipitation information, has been the subject of a number of recent studies. The northern and mid-cordilleran alp...

Hydroinformatics, throughout its more than 25 years of existence, has been applied to a set of research areas. So far, these applications include: hydraulics and hydrology, environmental science and technology, knowledge systems and knowledge management, urban water systems management. This paper introduces agricultural water systems management as...

Extreme precipitation events, including probable maximum precipitation (PMP) and probable maximum snow accumulation (PMSA) and 1/100 annual exceedance probability (AEP) values for precipitation (P100) and snow accumulation (expressed in snow water equivalent; SWE100) were analyzed over Newfoundland to compute the projected changes from 1971–2000 to...

The northern and mid-cordilleran alpine, sub-alpine, and boreal watersheds in Yukon, Canada, are prime examples of Nordic regions where any hydrological modelling application is challenging due to lack of accurate distributed precipitation information. In the course of the past few years, proper advancements were tailored to resolve the challenges...

Real-time monitoring of soil matric potential has now become a common practice for precision irrigation management. Some crops, such as cranberries, are susceptible to both water and anoxic stresses. Excessive variations in soil matric potential in the root zone may reduce plant transpiration, due to either saturated or dry soil conditions, thereby...

Two-wavelength scintillometer systems can provide much needed measurements of area-averaged sensible and latent heat fluxes. However, these devices rarely have been deployed on canopy-covered complex terrain, and never in the circumpolar boreal biome, where large-scale fluxes are essential to hydroclimate modellers. We present a comparison of fluxe...

Although the hydrological services of individual wetlands have been much acknowledged, their cumulative effect at the watershed scale has not been assessed as extensively. In this study, a distributed hydrological modeling platform, the PHYSITEL/HYDROTEL, was used to (i) investigate watershed hydrological processes with and without abundant wetland...

Despite recognizing the importance of hydrological function of wetlands, basin-scale wetlands services have rarely been investigated. The PHYSITEL/HYDROTEL modelling platform was used to quantitatively assess the impact of wetlands on quickflow and baseflow with paired simulation scenarios in Duobukuli River Basin, namely with wetlands and without...

The resolution of Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS) change data is too low to discriminate mass variations at the scale of glaciers, small ensemble of glaciers, or icefields. In this paper, we apply an iterative constraint modeling strategy over the Gulf Of Alaska (GOA) to improve the resolution of ice...

Surface waters are widely used as sources of drinking water in Canada. The identification of the main sources of pollutants to surface waters, often associated with increasing urbanization, is needed to improve management strategies. We used stable water isotopes (δ¹⁸O and δD), and nutrient and fecal coliform mass fluxes to estimate the seasonal co...

The boreal forest will be strongly affected by climate change and in turn, these vast ecosystems may significantly impact global climatology and hydrology due to their exchanges of carbon and water with the atmosphere. It is now crucial to understand the intricate relationships between precipitation and evapotranspiration in these environments, par...

The northeast black soil region of China, an important area of grain production, currently faces serious diffuse pollution issues. In this study, a dual isotopic (δ¹⁵N and δ¹⁸O) framework was used to determine nitrate sources in runoff of a small agricultural watershed of this region. The results indicated that the ranges of δ¹⁵N and δ¹⁸O values of...

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) in aquatic ecosystems are of concern worldwide. This review deals with how jurisdictions around the world are addressing this water quality issue to inform recommendations regarding nutrient loading and HABs in Missisquoi Bay-Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog; transboundary lakes located in the USA and Canada that suf...

Despite recognizing the importance of hydrological function of wetlands, watershed-scale wetlands services have rarely been investigated. The PHYSITEL/HYDROTEL modelling platform was used to quantitatively assess the impact of wetlands on quickflow and baseflow with paired simulation scenarios in Duobukuli River Basin, namely with wetlands and with...

Le lac Saint-Charles est la source d’eau potable qui alimente plusieurs municipalités sur le territoire métropolitain de Québec, près de 300 000 personnes. La forte urbanisation de son bassin versant a accéléré sa dégradation. Les données scientifiques laissent croire que cette dégradation pourrait être irréversible si les actions requises ne sont...

Le lac Saint-Charles est la source d’eau potable qui alimente plusieurs municipalités sur le territoire métropolitain de Québec, près de 300 000 personnes. La forte urbanisation de son bassin versant a accéléré sa dégradation. Les données scientifiques laissent croire que cette dégradation pourrait être irréversible si les actions requises ne sont...

This study was undertaken to quantify the projected changes related to the impacts of climate change between the 1971-2000 and 2041-2070 periods in the Salmon River basin in Newfoundland with respect to the spring and summer/fall probable maximum precipitation (PMP) and the 1/100 annual exceedance probability (AEP) precipitation (P100), the probabl...

A forecasting system combining a physically-based distributed hydrological model (HYDROTEL), an Ensemble Kalman Filtering (EnKF) Data Assimilation (DA), and forecasted meteorological data (obtained from the North American Ensemble Forecast System; NAEFS) is developed to forecast short-range (0–14 days lead) flows and inflows in the Aishihik and May...