Armand Larocque

University of New Brunswick · Remote Sensing Research Laboratory, ForEM

Saltmarshes provide important ecosystem services, including coastline protection, but face decline due to human activities and climate change. There are increasing efforts to conserve and restore saltmarshes worldwide. Our study evaluated the effectiveness of Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to monitor landcover changes using a saltmarsh restoration pr...

The eastern coastline of James Bay is known to have been home to sizeable eelgrass beds (Zostera marina L.) which thrived in the bay’s shallow, subarctic waters. The region was subjected to substantial hydroelectric dams, large fires, and other human activities in the past half-century. To assess the impact of these factors on eelgrass beds, a hist...

Indigenous-driven and community-partnered research projects seeking to develop salient, legitimate, and credible knowledge bases for environmental decision-making require a multiple knowledge systems approach. When involving partners in addition to communities, diverging perspectives and priorities may arise, making the pathways to engaging in prin...

Monitoring salt marshes with remote sensing is necessary to evaluate their state and restoration. Determining appropriate techniques for this can be overwhelming. Our study provides insight into whether a pixel-or object-based Random Forest classification approach is best for mapping vegetation in north temperate salt marshes. We used input variabl...

Accurate and efficient orchard tree inventories are essential for acquiring up-to-date information, which is necessary for effective treatments and crop insurance purposes. Surveying orchard trees, including tasks such as counting, locating, and assessing health status, plays a vital role in predicting production volumes and facilitating orchard ma...

Canada geese ( Branta canadensis ) migrating along coastal flyways are reliant on natural coastal ecosystems. Within these stopover sites, eelgrass ( Zostera marina ), the most common and widespread seagrass species in North America, is an important food resource for migrating waterfowl. Given the growing anthropogenic pressure on coastal ecosystem...

Atlantic Brant (Branta bernicla hrota) is an Arctic-breeding migratory waterfowl that relies heavily on Common Eelgrass (Zostera marina) for food during migration and overwintering. Although the abundance of Atlantic Brant along the coasts of the Maritime provinces has declined drastically over the past decades, some flocks continue to migrate thro...

Numbers of temperate‐breeding Atlantic and Mississippi Flyway Canada geese have greatly increased since the 1980s. Consequently, numbers of yearlings, sub‐adults and failed breeders undertaking pre‐molt migration to northern latitudes has also increased, potentially providing additional hunting opportunities for Cree hunters living near James Bay,...

Eelgrass (Zostera marina L.) is a marine angiosperm that grows throughout coastal regions in Atlantic Canada. This study aimed to assess the capability of UAV multispectral imagery to map the presence of eelgrass beds within two estuaries in Atlantic Canada (Souris River and Richibucto River). The images were mosaicked using Agisoft and calibrated...

Fire is a common phenomenon in many forests and is considered an important ecological tool. Fire severity mapping presents an effective way to assess post-fire management intervention and is helpful in environmental and climate change research. The objective of this study was to determine the severity of a forest fire event that occurred from 24th...

The pre-Contact Maya peoples build roads (Sacbeob) to facilitate movement between and within cities and surroundings. Given the dense forest cover in the Lowland Maya region now known as Yucatan, ground surveys of sacbeob are time-consuming and challenging to perform. Remote sensing can be a good alternative as it offers the advantages of extensive...

Salt marshes are intertidal ecosystems valuable for services including coastal protection and carbon sequestration. Restoration of salt marshes is popular in this era of climate change and sea-level rise, especially in areas where marshes have been historically altered, including in the Bay of Fundy. Salt marsh restoration involves landcover change...

This study presents the results of a field experiment conducted for assessing the crop health status of several barley and oat crop fields in Prince Edward Island, Canada. The crop fields were mapped with an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) and the crop health status was assessed through the Green Area Index (GAI) and vegetation indices (VIs). GAI ma...

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) are demonstrated cost- and time-effective remote sensing platforms for precision agriculture applications and crop damage monitoring. In this study, lodging damage on barley crops has been mapped from UAS imagery that was acquired over multiple barley fields with extensive lodging damages in two aerial surveys. A Ran...

Eelgrass (Zostera marina L.) is a marine angiosperm that grows throughout coastal regions in Atlantic Canada. Eelgrass beds provide a variety of important ecosystem services, and while it is considered an important marine species, little research has been done to understand its distribution and location within Atlantic Canada. The purpose of this s...

The eastern coastline of James Bay (Eeyou Istchee) is known to be home to beds of subarctic eelgrass (Zostera marina L.). These eelgrass beds provide valuable habitat and food source for coastal and marine animals and contribute valuable ecosystem services such as stabilization of the shoreline all along the coast. Despite reports from Cree communi...

The recent world-wide loss of seagrasses, which are critical components of coastal ecosystems, has ignited an effort among scientists and resource managers to develop effective monitoring tools. Although Landsat time-series is considered one of the most cost-effective options for monitoring landscapes, its application to monitor seagrasses remains...

The first Canadian Wetland Inventory (CWI) map, which was based on Landsat data, was produced in 2019 using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) big data processing platform. The proposed GEE-based method to create the preliminary CWI map proved to be a cost-, time-, and computationally efficient approach. Although the initial effort to produce an CWI map...

Eelgrass (Zostera marina L.) is a marine angiosperm plant that grows throughout coastal areas in Atlantic Canada. Eelgrass meadows provide numerous ecosystem services while they have been acknowledged as important habitats, their location, extent, and health in Atlantic Canada are poorly understood. This study examined the effectiveness of WorldVie...

Eelgrass (Zostera marina L.) is a marine angiosperm plant that grows throughout coastal areas in Atlantic Canada. Eelgrass meadows provide numerous ecosystem services, and while they have been acknowledged as important habitats, their location, extent, and health in Atlantic Canada are poorly understood. This study examined the effectiveness of Wor...

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have been proven cost- and time-effective remote-sensing platforms for precision agriculture applications. This study presents a method for automatic delineation of field areas and boundaries that uses UAS multispectral orthomosaics acquired over 7 vegetated fields having a variety of crops in Prince Edward Island (P...

Several maps of wetland areas in central New Brunswick, Canada, were produced by applying the Random Forests classifier to different combinations of optical Landsat-5 TM images, dual-polarized (HH, HV) Radarsat-2 C-band and Alos-1 PalSAR L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images and digital elevation data. The resulting maps were compared to 199...

Eelgrass beds are critical in coastal ecosystems and can be useful as a measure of nearshore ecosystem health. Population declines have been seen around the world, including in Atlantic Canada. Restoration has the potential to aid the eelgrass population. Traditionally, field-level protocols would be used to monitor restoration; however, using unma...

Mapping wetlands with high spatial and thematic accuracy is crucial for the management and monitoring of these important ecosystems. Wetland maps in New Brunswick (NB) have traditionally been produced by the visual interpretation of aerial photographs. In this study, we used an alternative method to produce a wetland map for southern New Brunswick,...

The use of aerial remote sensing platforms such as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) has been proven as a cost and time effective way to perform tasks related to precision agriculture and decision making. Two machine learning (ML) algorithms have been implemented on UAS blue and red band imagery to delineate field areas and extents of various bare so...

This study presents preliminary results on the detection of four potential Maya settlements (designed hereafter Sites A, B, C, and D) in the northern Petén area (State of Campeche, Mexico) often referred as the Petén Campechano, using new types of freely available Landsat-8 OLI optical and Sentinel-1A C-band dual-polarized images acquired during th...

The Canadian Arctic is currently subject to increased mapping activities for providing better knowledge to assist in making informed decisions for sustainable development. Surficial material maps are one of the required maps. For an area located in Nunavut, we produced a map with 21 surficial material classes by applying a non-parametric classifier...

Wetland maps currently in use by the Province of Nova Scotia, namely the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) wetland inventory map and the swamp wetland classes of the DNR forest map, need to be updated. In this study, wetlands were mapped in an area southwest of Halifax, Nova Scotia by classifying a combination of multi-date and multi-beam RADAR...

This publication summarizes the 2016 field work completed south of Wager Bay, mainland Nunavut, as part of the surficial component of the GEM‐2 Tehery‐Wager Activity within the Rae Project area (Fig. 1). The report outlines field methods and field observations regarding the regional surficial geology and glacial history, the detailed mapping of the...

Permafrost is an important ground thermal condition that has significant biophysical and socio-economic impacts. In order to better understand the distribution and dynamics of permafrost, there is a need to map permafrost at high spatial resolution. This study is part of a research project that aims to model and map permafrost using remote sensing...

Permafrost occurs mainly at high latitudes and is currently subjected to widespread thawing due to global warming, which has significant ecological and socio-economic impacts. One way to map permafrost condition and its change at high spatial resolution is to calculate soil temperatures using a process-based permafrost model, such as the Northern E...

This poster presents an overview of the 2015 field work completed along the northwestern shores of Hudson Bay, mainland Nunavut, as part of the surficial geology component of the GEM-2 Tehery-Wager Activity within the Rae Project. The poster highlights preliminary results regarding the regional surficial geology and Quaternary history, the mapping...

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a handheld system showing good potential for the real-time and nondestructive characterization of wood moisture content (MC). However, measurements performed over logs can be challenging because of their curved surface that can affect the GPR signal. In this study, the MC of thawed and frozen logs was estimated for...

Log moisture content (MC) has been determined based on the propagation velocity (PV) of ground penetrating radar (GPR) signals. This approach is based on measuring the travel time of the GPR signal through the log, from which its PV and the apparent log dielectric permittivity can be retrieved. Linear regression between the log dielectric permittiv...

Fast, reliable and non-destructive measurement of log moisture content (MC) is important to optimize the forest value chain. We investigated the use of early-time ground penetrating radar signals to determine MC of stacked logs of black spruce, quaking aspen and balsam poplar in mill yards. Two approaches are presented: a linear fitting between the...

Our study tests the use of dual-polarized (HH, HV) RADARSAT-2 C-band and ALOS-PALSAR L-band SAR images for mapping wetland areas in New Brunswick. The study also uses LANDSAT-5 TM and DEM data. The resulting maps were compared to GPS field data as well as to two wetland maps currently in use by the Province of New Brunswick. Overall the Random Fore...

Our study compared the traditional method of teaching remote sensing with a new method that use teaching platform and Internet. We showed that the new teaching method has more advantages than the traditional one. In addition, the paper presented three lectures that can be used to teach not only geography but also mathematics high school curricula.

Permafrost is an important ground condition in high latitudes. Climate warming may lead to thickening of active layer, reducing permafrost thickness and extent, melting ground ice, causing ground subsidence and thermokarst erosions. In order to better map the distribution and dynamics of permafrost, there is a need to develop and test permafrost mo...

Portable sensors are required for rapid and nondestructive measurements of wood properties in the field to ensure optimal use of the fiber. We tested a handheld near-infrared (NIR) spectrometer to estimate moisture content (MC) and basic specific gravity (BSG) of quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) and balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera L.)...

Our study presents results of a test of a hand-held micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS)-based near-infrared (NIR) spectrometer to estimate moisture content and basic specific gravity of black spruce frozen and unfrozen logs. The spectra were acquired on sapwood and heartwood as well as on tangential and transversal log sections. Partial least sq...

This review article examines past and current research on the application of near-infrared (NIR) reflectance/transmittance spectroscopy (NIRS) for real-time monitoring of moisture content and density of solid wood. Most of the applications of NIRS on solid wood have focussed on the application of multivariate statistics as exploratory tools for the...

Our study assesses the use of multibeam RADARSAT-2 dual-polarization C-HH and C-HV, LANDSAT-7 ETM+, and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data for mapping surficial materials in Nunavut, Canada. The RADARSAT-2 images were cquired using standard beam 1 and 7 modes in both ascending and descending orbits. RADARSAT-2 images were filtered to reduce speckle...

Our study assesses the effect of incidence angle on classifications obtained using various polarimetric classifiers applied to polarimetric RADARSAT-2 synthetic aperature radar (SAR) images for mapping surficial materials in Arctic Canada. The RADARSAT-2 polarimetric SAR images were acquired over the Umiujalik Lake test area of Nunavut in three wes...

This study assesses the use of multibeam RADARSAT-2 multipolarized synthetic aperture radar images (hereafter termed "RADARSAT-2 images"), in combination with LANDSAT-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) and digital elevation model (DEM) data for mapping surficial materials (bedrock, boulders, organic material, sand and gravel, thick till, and thin ti...

In several processes of the forest products industry, an in-depth knowledge of log and board internal features is required and their determination needs fast scanning systems. One of the possible technologies is X-ray computed tomography (CT) technology. Our paper reviews applications of this technology in wood density measurements, in wood moistur...

Our study presents an assessment of the use of multi-beam RADARSAT-2 dual-polarization C-HH and C-HV SAR imagery for surficial geology mapping in Nunavut, Canada. The RADARSAT-2 SAR images were acquired using the Standard Beam 1 and 7 (S1 and S7) modes in both ascending (A) and descending (D) orbits. Multispectral LANDSAT-7 ETM+ and digital elevati...

Scheduled lectures and supervised laboratory sessions are the classical method of teaching radar polarimetry and polarimetric SAR image processing courses. This paper describes a new teaching method that uses multimedia and Internet technology in offering self- paced, web-based courses. Advantages and disadvantages of each method are presented.

Lectures and supervised laboratory sessions are the classical methods of teaching geomatics (GISscience, photo-interpretation and remote sensing) courses. This paper describes a new teaching method that uses multimedia and Internet technology in offering self-paced, web-based courses. Advantages and disadvantages of each method are presented.

Classically, remote sensing has been used as input data for land cover mapping. Through remote sensing studies at the University of New Brunswick Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management, broader applications have been developed. These include: 1) fuel moisture mapping using optical and thermal infrared NOAA-AVHRR and MODIS images, as well...

At the end of the last glaciation, an open sea arm called the «Champlain Sea» submerged the St. Lawrence River Valley, in Northeast North America. The maximum limit of this late-glacial marine sea was already delineated along the Appalachians margin of southern Québec, except in the St. François River valley. Some previous works suggested that the...

During deglaciation, several valleys of the Appalachians of southern Québec were affected by the pounding of ice-dammed lakes. More than 300 water planes were reconstructed in the southeastern part of the region with the methodology presented elsewhere in this volume (Quat. Int. (2002) this volume). Their characteristics during deglaciation gradual...

Previous studies on the deglaciation of the Appalachians of southern Québec reconstructed only the most extensive ice-dammed lakes and the most stable glaciolacustrine water levels. They only used the best developed shoreline features, and thus were not able to reconstruct small or short-lived ice-dammed lakes, both being characterized by a weak de...

Wind and cloud cover effects on variabilities of radiance, irradiance and reflectance were analysed using ground-based measurements acquired over flooded rice crops in the red and near-infrared SPOT-HRV bands under variable wind and cloud cover conditions. Overall, spectral measurements were more variable in the near-infrared than in the red band....

Wind and cloud cover effects on variabilities of radiance, irradiance and reflectance were analysed using ground-based measurements acquired over flooded rice crops in the red and near-infrared SPOT-HRV bands under variable wind and cloud cover conditions. Overall, spectral measurements were more variable in the near-infrared than in the red band....

"NQ-60599." "Thèse présentée à la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph. D.) en géographie." Thèse (Ph. D.)--Université de Montréal, 2000. Microfiche (Positif).

A case study of photo interpretation of an area in the Appolachian Mountains of southern Quebec, Canada. The area is drained by the Coaticook River and 3 major areas are used for interpretation purposes: 1) a morainal dam; 2) the area to the S; and 3) the area downstream. A copy of the image, with interpreted overlay, is included.-after Authors

This fieldtrip guidebook contains descriptions of some of the stratigraphic sections in which are exposed several key units of the Quaternary record in southern Quebec. New evidence indicates that Appalachian glacial outflow centers lasted throughout deposition of the Early(?) to Middle Wisconsinan Chaudiere Till. Thermoluminescence dating suggests...

RÉSUMÉ Les études antérieures sur le Quaternaire du sud du Québec mettent en évidence un modèle général de déglaciation basé sur la position des moraines principales. Notre étude, axée sur une logique des formes et des dépôts, détaille l'évolution de la récession glaciaire et le développement des lacs retenus par le front de l'inlandsis, dans une s...