Nicole K SandersonUniversité du Québec à Montréal | UQAM · Department of Geography
Nicole K Sanderson
PhD Physical Geography
About
17
Publications
6,865
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571
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am a geoscientist studying the effects of environmental change on peatlands, wetlands, forests, and soils. My current research relates to issues with dating recent peat (210Pb, 14C) to evaluate impacts of recent and rapid shifts in climate, disturbance (permafrost thaw) and land-use on peatland carbon accumulation. I am particularly interested in applied research projects to better inform resource management practices and conservation/restoration projects.
Additional affiliations
March 2022 - December 2022
Position
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Description
- C-PEAT data manager for the P3D - peat paleo proxy database (in progress). Working on modelling peat initiation & Sphagnum shifts in Arctic "proto-peatland" patches using HPM
Education
September 2011 - August 2016
September 2009 - September 2010
September 2003 - April 2007
Publications
Publications (17)
We have compiled a large dataset of peat and soil cores from temperate and boreal regions of eastern Canada to develop a simple field method for estimating the mass of soil organic carbon (SOC) stored in undisturbed wetlands (peatlands, swamps and marshes). We show that it is possible to predict the SOC mass in different wetland types by measuring...
Anticosti Island, located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (GSL; Quebec, Canada) is covered by ~25% peatland ecosystems, and conditions supporting their development remain poorly documented. We present the first reconstructions of the ecohydrological conditions (vegetation successions and water table variations) and related carbon accumulation of two ma...
Northern peatlands are a major component of the global carbon (C) cycle. Widespread climate‐driven ecohydrological changes in these ecosystems can have major consequences on their C sequestration function. Here, we synthesise plant macrofossil data from 33 surficial peat cores from different ecoclimatic regions, with high‐resolution chronologies. T...
Peatlands are natural ecosystems that provide archives of the hydrological cycle, ecological processes and terrestrial carbon dynamics. In the north-central region of Quebec (eastern Canada), patterned peatlands developed in topographic depressions of the Precambrian Shield following the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreat. These peatlands display charact...
The increasing interest in understanding anthropogenic impacts on the environment have led to a considerable number of studies focusing on sedimentary records for the last $\sim$ 100 - 200 years. Dating this period is often complicated by the poor resolution and large errors associated with radiocarbon (14C) ages, which is the most popular dating t...
Peatlands are globally important ecosystems but many are degraded and some are eroding. However, some degraded peatlands are undergoing apparently spontaneous recovery, with switches from erosion to renewed carbon accumulation – a type of ecological regime shift. We used a palaeoecological approach to investigate and help understand such a switch i...
Covering extensive parts of China, karst is a critically important landscape that has experienced rapid and intensive land use change and associated ecosystem degradation within only the last 50 years. In the natural state, key ecosystem services delivered by these landscapes include regulation of the hydrological cycle, nutrient cycling and supply...
We investigate coastal wetland ecosystem resilience to sea level rise by modelling sea level rise trajectories and the impact on vegetation communities for a coastal wetland in South Africa. The rate of sediment accretion was modelled relative to IPCC sea level rise estimates for multiple RCP scenarios. For each scenario, inundation by neap and spr...
Late Holocene sea-level changes can be reconstructed from salt-marsh sediments with decimetre-scale precision and decadal-scale resolution. These records of relative sea-level changes comprise the net sea-level contributions from mechanisms that act across local, regional and global scales. Recent efforts help to constrain the relative significance...
The carbon sink potential of peatlands depends on the balance between carbon uptake by plants and microbial decomposition. The rates of both these processes will increase with warming but it remains unclear which will dominate the global peatland response. Here we examine the global relationship between peatland carbon accumulation rates during the...
In many studies of environmental change of the past few centuries, 210Pb dating is used to obtain chronologies for sedimentary sequences. One of the most commonly used approaches to estimate the ages of depths in a sequence is to assume a constant rate of supply (CRS) or influx of `unsupported' 210Pb from the atmosphere, together with a constant or...
Permafrost stores globally significant amounts of carbon (C) which may start to decompose and be released to the atmosphere in form of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane (CH 4 ) as global warming promotes extensive thaw. This permafrost carbon feedback to climate is currently considered to be the most important carbon-cycle feedback missing from cl...
The most carbon (C) dense ecosystems of Amazonia are areas characterised by the presence of peatlands. However, Amazonian peatland ecosystems are poorly understood and are threatened by human activities. Here we present an investigation into long-term ecohydrological controls on C accumulation in an Amazonian peat dome. This site is the oldest peat...
Large areas of upland mire and moorland in Northwest Europe are regarded as degraded, not actively peat-forming, and releasing carbon. Conservation agencies have short-term targets to restore such areas, but often have no clear knowledge of the timing and nature of degradation. It has been suggested that palaeoecology can be used to inform conserva...
The peatland pole forests of the Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin (PMFB), Peru, are the most carbon-dense ecosystems known in Amazonia once below ground carbon stores are taken into account. Here we present the first multiproxy palaeoenvironmental record including pollen data from one of these peatlands, San Jorge in northern Peru, supported by an ag...
Permafrost peatlands contain globally important amounts of soil organic carbon, owing to cold conditions which suppress anaerobic decomposition. However, climate warming and permafrost thaw threaten the stability of this carbon store. The ultimate fate of permafrost peatlands and their carbon stores is unclear because of complex feedbacks between p...
Projects
Project (1)
The overall goal of the SPECTRA project is to "advance quantitative understanding of the response, resilience and recovery of the Karst Critical Zone of China" to disturbance (http://geography.exeter.ac.uk/spectra/partnership/).
For this project, we are field testing a new portable gamma spectrometer (Trans-Spec) for in situ measurements of 137Cs inventories, to quantify soil erosion and redistribution.
