John J. Clague

Simon Fraser University · Department of Earth Sciences

The Muskingum model is one of the most widely used hydrological methods in flood routing, and calibrating its parameters is an ongoing research challenge. We optimized Muskingum model parameters to accurately simulate hourly output hydrographs of three flood-prone rivers in the Karun watershed, Iran. We evaluated model performance using the correla...

Floods are both complex and destructive, and in most parts of the world cause injury, death, loss of agricultural land, and social disruption. Flood susceptibility (FS) maps are used by land‐use managers and land owners to identify areas that are at risk from flooding and to plan accordingly. This study uses machine learning ensembles to produce ob...

The current limited approaches to calculating hillslope erosion rate hamper the study of the relationships among the rates of hillslope erosion, river incision, and tectonic uplift and hence the discussion of steady-state landscape evolution. In this paper, we use remote sensing and geochronological methods to calculate the upper and lower bounding...

Episodic failures of ice-dammed lakes have produced some of the largest floods in history, with disastrous consequences for communities in high mountains1–7. Yet, estimating changes in the activity of ice-dam failures through time remains controversial because of inconsistent regional flood databases. Here, by collating 1,569 ice-dam failures in si...

Protection against natural hazards (i.e., floods, landslides, forest fires, and earthquakes) is vital in land-use planning, especially in high-risk areas. Multi-hazard susceptibility maps can be used by land-use manager to guide urban development, to minimize the risk of natural disasters. The objective of the present study was to use four machine...

Documenting habitats of rangeland plant species is required to properly manage rangelands and to understand ecosystem processes. A reliable rangeland species potential map can help managers and policy makers design a sustainable grazing system on rangelands. The aim of this study is to map the plant species in the Qurveh City rangelands, Kurdistan...

Mechanisms underlying plant succession remain highly debated. A global quantification of the relative importance of species addition versus replacement is lacking due to the local scope of most studies. We quantified their role in the variation of plant communities colonizing the forelands of 46 retreating glaciers distributed worldwide, using both...

Global atmospheric warming is causing physical and biotic changes in Earth’s high mountains at a rate that is likely unprecedented in the Holocene. We summarize changes in the presently glacierized mountains of northwest North America, including a rapid and large reduction in glacier ice and permafrost, a related increase in slope instability and l...

We analyze the sensitivity of a large (area extent ∼3 km2), deep-seated gravitational slope deformation (Fels slide, Alaska Range) to three specific drivers: (i) liquid surface water input from ERA-5 reanalysis snow melt and rainfall; (ii) locally projected seismic activity of Alaskan earthquakes; and (iii) lowering of Fels Glacier at the slide toe...

Soil erosion is a major cause of damage to agricultural lands in many parts of the world and is of particular concern in semiarid parts of Iran. We use five machine learning techniques—Random Forest (RF), M5P, Reduced Error Pruning Tree (REPTree), Gaussian Processes (GP), and Pace Regression (PR)—under two scenarios to predict soil erodibility in t...

Land reclamation in the Yan'an New District (YND) on the Chinese Loess Plateau is one of the largest earthworks projects in the world, involving the excavation of loess from ridges and the deposition of the material in adjacent valleys, flattening an area of more than 78 km². It can take multiple years for the landscape to adjust to the new topogra...

Protection against natural hazards is vital in land-use planning, especially in high-risk areas. Multi-hazard susceptibility maps can be used by land-use manager to guide urban development, so as to minimize the risk of natural disasters. The objective of the present study was to use five machines based on learning methods to produce multi-hazard s...

Soil water erosion (SWE) is an important global hazard that affects food availability through soil degradation, a reduction in crop yield, and agricultural land abandonment. A map of soil erosion susceptiblity is a first and vital step in land management and soil conservation. Several machine learning (ML) algorithms optimized using the Grey Wolf O...

Landslides are major threats to the construction and operation of electric towers of the Sichuan–Tibet Grid Interconnection Project (STGIP). The long, narrow project corridor is vulnerable to different types of landslides, making risk management a difficult task. In this study, a kinematic-based, landslide risk management framework that includes ha...

No abstract for this introductory article.

There is disagreement in the Quaternary research community in how much of the marine δ¹⁸O signal is driven by change in ice volume. Here, we examine this topic by bringing together empirical and modelling work for Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3; 57 ka to 29 ka), a time when the marine δ¹⁸O record indicates moderate continental glaciation and a globa...

We describe and model the evolution of a recent landslide, tsunami, outburst flood and sediment plume in the southern Coast Mountains, British Columbia, Canada. On 28 November 2020, about 18 million m3 of rock descended 1000 m from a steep valley wall and traveled across the toe of a glacier before entering a 0.6 km2 glacier lake and producing >100...

The Chinese government has implemented measures to reduce poverty in the country. Specifically, the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (2013–2020) policy is a set of unique, large-scale and precise poverty control measures undertaken by China in an effort to eliminate absolute poverty. Deeply impoverished areas in the mountainous regions of Southwest Chi...

In this work, a simple methodology for preliminarily assessing the magnitude of potential landslide-induced impulse waves’ attenuation in mountain lakes is presented. A set of metrics is used to define the geometries of theoretical mountain lakes of different sizes and shapes and to simulate impulse waves in them using the hydrodynamic software Flo...

Combined use of radiocarbon-dated subfossil wood within lateral moraines and surface exposure ages on moraine boulders provides an approach to better constrain times of glacier advance and onset of retreat. We test this method at Gilbert Glacier in the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia where units of sediments associated with glacier exp...

Evidence of at least three, Early to Middle Pleistocene glaciations is recorded in the stratigraphic exposures near the outer limit of glaciation in southern Patagonia. At Cabo Vírgenes, at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan, up to 70 m of till, gravel, sand, and stony silt were deposited in a grounding-line environment at the front of the Magella...

Unusual channel-amphitheatre landforms are present in Late Pleistocene–early Holocene, subaqueous fan and delta deposits in the glacial Lake Fraser basin, central British Columbia. The lake formed during the decay of the last Cordilleran Ice Sheet and drained ~11,500 years ago during a large outburst flood. The fronts of a delta and two subaqueous...

Glacial lake sediments exposed at two sites in Skagit Valley, Washington, encase abundant macrofossils dating from 27.7 to 19.8 cal ka BP. At the last glacial maximum (LGM) most of the valley floor was part of a regionally extensive arid boreal (subalpine) forest that periodically included montane and temperate trees and open boreal species such as...

Most of the world’s mountain glaciers have been retreating for more than a century in response to climate change. Glacier retreat is evident on all continents, and the rate of retreat has accelerated during recent decades. Accurate, spatially explicit information on the position of glacier margins over time is useful for analyzing patterns of glaci...

With the growth of cities, urban flooding has increasingly become an issue for regional and national governments. The destructive effects of floods are magnified in cities. Accurate models of urban flood susceptibility are required to mitigate this hazard mitigation and build resilience in cities. In this paper, we evaluate flood riskin Jiroft city...

We present a workflow for investigating large, slow-moving landslides which combines the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique, GIS post-processing, and airborne laser scanning (ALS), and apply it to Fels landslide in Alaska, US. First, we exploit a speckle tracking (ST) approach to derive the easting, northing, and vertical components of the di...

We used three state-of-the-art machine learning techniques (boosted regression tree, random forest, and support vector machine) to produce a multi-hazard (MHR) map illustrating areas susceptible to flooding, gully erosion, forest fires, and earthquakes in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, Iran. The earthquake hazard map was derived from a probab...

Predicting the spatial impact of debris flows on fans is challenging due to complex runout behaviour. Debris flow mobility is highly variable and flows can sporadically avulse the channel. For hazard and risk assessments, practitioners typically base the probability of spatial impact or avulsion on their experience and expert judgment. To support d...

The relationship between landslides and rock mass strength is fundamental for assessing landslide hazards. Some researchers have proposed that there is an inverse relationship between the number of landslides and rock mass strength. However, in some tectonically active mountain ranges, higher rates of landsliding appear to be associated with greate...

A deadly cascade A catastrophic landslide in Uttarakhand state in India on February 2021 damaged two hydropower plants, and more than 200 people were killed or are missing. Shugar et al. describe the cascade of events that led to this disaster. A massive rock and ice avalanche roared down a Himalayan valley, turning into a deadly debris flow upstre...

We use results of satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar, Global Positioning System, and borehole inclinometer data to constrain numerical models that improve understanding of slope deformation at the Alexandria landslide, British Columbia, Canada. Surface monitoring data and borehole slope inclinometer measurements provide import...

Recent technological developments including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, terrestrial laser scanning, photogrammetry and point cloud analysis software tools greatly enhance our ability to investigate the relationship between faulting and the spatial geometrical and mechanical characteristics of a rock mass controlled by faulting. Using the Yarlung Tsan...

This study attempted to predict ground subsidence occurrence using statistical and machine learning models, specifically the evidential belief function (EBF), index of entropy (IoE), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF) models in the Rafsanjan Plain in southern Iran to investigate 11 possible causative factors: slope percent, aspect...

Earth's climate is warming and will continue to warm as the century progresses. High mountains and high latitudes are experiencing the greatest warming of all regions on Earth and also are some of the most sensitive areas to climate change, in part because ecosystems and natural processes in these areas are intimately linked to the cryosphere. Evid...

High resolution topographic modeling has become more accessible due to the development of Structure from Motion (SfM) image matching algorithms in digital photogrammetry. Large archival databases of historical aerial photographs are available in university, public, and government libraries, commonly as paper copies. The photos can be in poor condit...

Laguna de Agnia is located within an endorheic basin in arid extra-Andean Patagonia. A variety of erosional and depositional landforms, most of which are relict, are well preserved in the basin. Geological, geomorphological, and sedimentological studies, ¹⁴C and ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages, and paleomagnetic data allow us to modify the published interpretation...

Loess covers approximately 6.6% of China and forms thick extensive deposits in the northern and northwestern parts of the country. Natural erosional processes and human modification of thick loess deposits have produced abundant, potentially unstable steep slopes in this region. Slope deformation monitoring aimed at evaluating the mechanical behavi...

The displacement of a large slow-moving landslide is accompanied by slope damage, such as fractures, tension cracks, and slope bulging. Studies of these features provide insight into the mechanisms responsible for the deformation. In this paper, we investigate slope damage at the Downie Slide, a very large landslide in British Columbia, Canada, tha...

The landscape of the Rhine River valley between Chur and Ilanz bears the signature of two remarkable events that happened shortly after the end of the Last Glacial Period. Two huge rockslides blocked the river and formed upstream lakes. The Flims rockslide (10 km³) liquefied about 1 km³ of alluvial and lacustrine sediments, and the liquefied slurry...

GIS-based multicriteria evaluation (MCE) provides a framework for analysing complex decision problems by quantifying variables of interest to score potential locations according to their suitability. In the context of earthquake preparedness and post-disaster response, MCE has relied mainly on uninformed or non-expert stakeholders to identify high-...

Mount Meager, a glacier-clad volcanic complex in British Columbia, Canada, is known for its large landslides, as well as a major eruption about 2360 years ago. In 2010, after decades of glacier retreat, the south flank of Mount Meager collapsed, generating a huge (53 Mm³) landslide. In 2016, fumaroles formed ice caves in one of the glaciers on the...

Water bodies impounded by glaciers, moraines, and ice jams on rivers can drain suddenly, with disastrous downstream consequences. Lakes can form at the margins of an alpine glacier or ice cap, on its surface, or at its base. Smaller pockets of water may also be present within some glaciers. In all cases, these water bodies might drain by enlarging...

A synthesis of the rapidly growing field of anthropic geomorphology is presented that includes impacts on geomorphic systems, impacts of climate change, effects of geomorphic systems on society, and natural hazards. Conceptual models of anthropogenic geomorphic impacts that join human and physical factors are narrow in scope relative to the broad s...

Since the last glacial maximum, soil formation related to ice‐cover shrinkage has been one major sink of carbon accumulating as soil organic matter (SOM), a phenomenon accelerated by the ongoing global warming. In recently deglacierized forelands, processes of SOM accumulation, including those that control carbon and nitrogen sequestration rates an...

Reliable flash flood susceptibility maps are a vital tool for land planners and emergency management officials for early flood warning and mitigation. We have developed a new ensemble learning model that predicts flash flood susceptibility at Haraz, Iran. The new model couples a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model with an extreme learning machine (...

Flash floods are responsible for loss of life and considerable property damage in many countries. Flood susceptibility maps contribute to flood risk reduction in areas that are prone to this hazard if appropriately used by land-use planners and emergency managers. The main objective of this study is to prepare an accurate flood susceptibility map f...

Stephen C. Porter was an international leader in Quaternary science for several decades, having worked on most of the world’s continents and having led international organizations and a prominent interdisciplinary journal. His work influenced many individuals, and he played an essential role in linking Chinese Quaternary science with the broader in...

This paper introduces a new deep-learning algorithm of deep belief network (DBN) based on an extreme learning machine (ELM) that is structured by back propagation (BN) and optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, named DEBP, for flood susceptibility mapping in the Vu Gia-Thu Bon watershed, central Vietnam. We use 847 locations of f...

A bathymetric survey of Harrison Lake in southwest British Columbia revealed deposits of three large landslides on the lake floor. The blocky and flow-like surface morphology of the deposits suggests rapid emplacement from subaerial sources. The multibeam survey, together with a subbottom acoustic survey, allowed us to estimate deposit volumes of 2...

We used AdaBoost (AB), alternating decision tree (ADTree), and their combination as an ensemble model (AB-ADTree) to spatially predict landslides in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. The models were trained with a database of 152 landslides compiled using Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry, Google Earth images, and field surveys, and 17 conditi...

Shallow landslides damage buildings and other infrastructure, disrupt agriculture practices, and can cause social upheaval and loss of life. As a result, many scientists study the phenomenon, and some of them have focused on producing landslide susceptibility maps that can be used by land-use managers to reduce injury and damage. This paper contrib...

We generated high-quality shallow landslide susceptibility maps for Bijar County, Kurdistan Province, Iran, using Random Forest (RAF), an ensemble computational intelligence method and three meta classifiers-Bagging (BA, BA-RAF), Random Subspace (RS, RS-RAF), and Rotation Forest (RF, RF-RAF). Modeling and validation were done on 111 shallow landsli...

Shallow landslides damage buildings and other infrastructure, disrupt agriculture practices, and can cause social upheaval and loss of life. As a result, many scientists study the phenomenon, Int. and some of them have focused on producing landslide susceptibility maps that can be used by land-use managers to reduce injury and damage. This paper co...

Gully erosion destroys agricultural and domestic grazing land in many countries, especially those with arid and semi-arid climates and easily eroded rocks and soils. It also generates large amounts of sediment that can adversely impact downstream river channels. The main objective of this research is to accurately detect and predict areas prone to...

Some lateral moraines contain a rich record of Holocene glacial expansion. Previous workers have used such evidence to document glacial fluctuations in western Canada, Alaska, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest, but similar studies in Patagonia are uncommon. Here we report on the late Holocene behavior of Stoppani Glacier, a 75 km ² glacier sourced in...

The article “Observations on the May 2019 Joffre Peak landslides, British Columbia”, written by Pierre Friele, Tom H. Millard, Andrew Mitchell, Kate E. Allstadt, Brian Menounos, Marten Geertsema and John J. Clague, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on January 2020 without open access...

This paper reviews current understanding of deglaciation in North, Central and South America from the Last Glacial Maximum to the beginning of the Holocene. Together with paleoclimatic and paleoceanographic data, we compare and contrast the pace of deglaciation and the response of glaciers to major climate events. During the Global Last Glacial Max...