Clément Chion

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais

Landscapes are complex systems. Landscape dynamics are the result of multiple interacting biophysical and socioeconomic processes that are linked across a broad range of spatial, temporal, and organizational scales. Understanding and describing landscape dynamics poses enormous challenges and demands the use of new multiscale approaches to modeling...

Anticipating the impacts of a new policy before implementation on a complex social–ecological system is a challenging task for managers and policymakers. This paper reports on the development and use of an agent-based model (ABM) dedicated to support marine park managers in their effort to devise policies to sustainably manage whale-watching activi...

The distribution of poikilotherms is determined by the thermal structure of the marine environment that they are exposed to. Recent research has indicated that changes in migration phenology of beluga whales in the Arctic are triggered by changes in the thermal structure of the marine environment in their summering area. If sea temperatures reflect...

a b s t r a c t Integrating humans in our perception of ecosystems is of critical importance to adequately protect natural resources. This poses the challenge of understanding human decision making in the context of decisions potentially threatening nature's integrity. We developed a spatially explicit agent-based model that sim-ulates commercial w...

A new method, called genetic programming-spectral vegetation index (GP-SVI), for the extraction of information from hyperspectral data is presented. This method is introduced in the context of precision farming. GP-SVI derives a regression model describing a specific crop biophysical variable from hyperspectral images (verified with in situ observa...

Animal vocalizations can evolve structural features as long-term adaptations to noisy environments. Using such signals, cetaceans could mitigate masking from vessel noise. This study investigates whether beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) use ultrasonic high-frequency burst pulse (HFBP) calls to communicate in noisy conditions. We identified HFB...

There are gaps in our understanding of sturgeon's response to anthropogenic sounds and the spatial scales at which they occur. We measured spatial displacement of Atlantic sturgeon in the St. Lawrence River at various distances of approaching merchant ships. This fish population is designated as “threatened,” although anthropogenic noise is not cur...

The endangered beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas) of the St. Lawrence Estuary (SLEB) faces threats from a variety of anthropogenic factors. Since belugas are a highly social and vocal species, passive acoustic monitoring has the potential to deliver, in a non-invasive and continuous way, real-time information on SLEB spatiotemporal habitat use, w...

Interindividual variability in habitat preferences affect local abundance and residency times. Within a population range, this can lead to sectors having a continuous flow of unique individuals, with others being used by the same set of resident individuals. These patterns of habitat use by individuals, referred to here as individual spatial mixing...

The whales of the St. Lawrence Estuary in Quebec, Canada, including the resident beluga (Delphinapterus leucas) population, classified as endangered and continuing to decline, face many threats of anthropogenic origins, in particular underwater noise generated by boat engines. In order to better understand the impact of recreational boating on the...

To efficiently monitor the growth and evolution of a particular wildlife population, one of the main fundamental challenges to address in animal ecology is the re-identification of individuals that have been previously encountered but also the discrimination between known and unknown individuals (the so-called "open-set problem"), which is the firs...

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Anthropogenic noise from navigation is a major contributor to the disturbance of the acoustic soundscape in underwater environments containing noise-sensitive life forms. While previous studies mostly developed protocols for the empirical determination of noise source levels associated with the world’s commercial fleet, this work explores the radia...

Exposure to anthropogenic noise from the commercial fleet is one of the primary constituents of the acoustic pollution perturbing the environment of aquatic life. Merchant ships (e.g. bulkers, tankers) have been the focus of numerous studies for underwater noise source level determination and modeling. This work extends pre-existing studies to the...

Agent-based models return spatiotemporal information used to process time series of specific parameters for specific individuals called “agents”. For complex, advanced and detailed models, this typically comes at the expense of high computing times and requires access to important computing resources. This paper provides an example on how machine l...

A key aspect of ocean protection consists in estimating the abundance of marine mammal population density within their habitat, which is usually accomplished using visual inspection and cameras from line-transect ships, small boats, and aircraft. However, marine mammal observation through vessel surveys requires significant workforce resources, inc...

Estimating the impacts of anthropogenic disturbances requires an understanding of the habitat‐use patterns of individuals within a population. This is especially the case when disturbances are localized within a population's spatial range, as variation in habitat use within a population can drastically alter the distribution of impacts. Here, we il...

Vessel underwater noise (VUN) is one of the main threats to the recovery of the endangered St. Lawrence Estuary Beluga population (SLEB). The 1% yearly population decline indicates that the cumulative threats are already beyond sustainable limits for the SLEB. However, a potential threefold increase in shipping traffic is expected within its critic...

The St. Lawrence is a vast and complex socio-ecological system providing a wealth of services that sustain numerous economic sectors. This ecosystem is subject to significant human pressures that overlap and potentially interact with climate-driven environmental changes. Our objective in this paper was to systematically characterize the distributio...

Background: Commercial shipping is identified as a major source of anthropogenic underwater noise in several ecologically sensitive areas. Any development project likely to increase marine traffic can thus be required to assess environmental impacts of underwater noise. Therefore, project holders are increasingly engaging in underwater noise modeli...

This article explores the suitability of Ostrom and colleagues' social-ecological systems framework (SESF) for the study of resource-dependent communities in Canada. Through a broad literature about resource-dependent communities in Canada, three main approaches are identified, named staples research, rural development, and sustainability studies....

A regional assessment of cumulative impacts is required for the Estuary and Gulf of St. Lawrence to facilitate ecosystem based management supported by evidence. The only currently available assessment was performed at the global scale using 19 drivers of anthropogenic stressors such as fisheries and pollution. While valuable, certain datasets inclu...

Lethal collisions with ships are limiting the recovery of several at-risk whale species worldwide. In the St. Lawrence Estuary (Quebec, Canada), the endangered blue whale and of special concern fin whale are among the migratory species subject to collisions with large ships. In 2011, a working group composed of representatives from the maritime ind...

Composition of the working group. (DOCX)

Speed through water: Description and accuracy. (DOCX)

Step-by-step procedure to compute the effectiveness of the voluntary conservation measures. (DOCX)

Overall slow-down efforts in the speed reduction area (SRA). (DOCX)

Le système d'identification automatique (AIS), un outil pour la gestion d'aires marines protégées : revue des applications au parc marin du Saguenay-Saint-Laurent Samuel Turgeon, Cristiane Cavalcante de Albuquerque Martins, Clément Chion et Nadia Ménard Résumé Les diverses conséquences des activités de navigation sur le milieu marin sont maintenant...

Les diverses conséquences des activités de navigation sur le milieu marin sont maintenant reconnues et de plus en plus documentées, en particulier sur les mammifères marins. Dans les dernières années, les gouvernements se sont engagés à rehausser le niveau de protection du milieu marin, notamment par la création d’aires marines protégées. Le systèm...

Looking at two cases of community forests (CF) in Eastern North America, this article examines their institutional features in order to assess whether they are conducive to adaptive governance. To do so, this article presents CFs as manifestations of polycentric governance, which allow identifying the complex networks of relations existing between...

Gathering data for large scale, systematic research initiatives such as regional multi-stressor analyses can be a very challenging - not to say painful - process. On one hand, there is an overwhelming wealth of data available, while on the other hand, some required data remain largely unavailable or inaccessible. Coupled with political intricacies,...

The recovery of whale species at risk requires the implementation of protection measures designed to mitigate the risks posed by various stressors. In the St. Lawrence Estuary (Canada), several whale species are threatened by navigation activities in various ways. Since 2013, seasonal voluntary ship strike miti-gation measures, including a speed re...

A study on the perception of vulnerability and adaptive capacity to climate change (CC) was realised among 27 small private forest owners (SPFOs) of a region in southern Quebec. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with SPFOs of diverse profiles to better understand their perception of environmental disturbances and their needs to imp...

The St. Lawrence River estuary is a busy maritime route through which ships transit to reach Canadian and American ports located along the river and in the Great Lakes of North America. It is also home to an endangered population of beluga whales and is used as a summer foraging ground by minke, blue, humpback, and fin whales. The high number of wh...

Multi-agent models can bear several names depending on the field they were initially developed in (e.g. agent-based model in social science, individual-based model in ecology). Agent- and individual-based models (ABMs and IBMs) are becoming tools of choice to simulate complex social–ecological systems (Gimblett, 2002; Janssen & Ostrom, 2006; Montic...

Landscapes are complex systems. Landscape dynamics are the result of multiple interacting biophysical and socioeconomic processes that are linked across a broad range of spatial, temporal, and organizational scales. Understanding and describing landscape dynamics poses enormous challenges and demands the use of new multiscale approaches to modeling...

We describe a decision support system that has been developed to inform management and planning in a portion of the St. Lawrence Estuary in Canada (covering the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park and the proposed St. Lawrence Estuary Marine Protected Area). The system is composed of a spatiotemporal, georeferenced database, a simulator (3MTSim) that...

Natural resource managers of protected areas are concerned with the management of human activities potentially harmful to ecosystems’ health and/or integrity. These systems where human interact with natural resources are called social-ecological systems (SES) and possess the characteristics of complex adaptive systems (e.g. co-evolution). The SES o...

Nitrogen is one of the most important chemical intakes to ensure the healthy growth of agricultural crops. However, some environmental concerns emerge (soil and water pollution) when a farmer applies nitrogen in excess. In this study, we propose a new method called GP-SVI to search for the best descriptive model of nitrogen content in a cornfield (...

One of the main issues of remote sensing is the extraction of relevant information from a data set. Recent development of hyperspectral tools has considerably increased the amount of available data and consequently, new techniques for data mining are required. In precision farming, emergence and democratization of hyperspectral imagery gives rise t...