Rodolphe Devillers

Institute of Research for Development | IRD · 228 - Space for Development (ESPACE-DEV)

Species distribution models (SDMs) have proven valuable in filling gaps in our knowledge of species occurrences. However, despite their broad applicability, SDMs exhibit critical shortcomings due to limitations in species occurrence data. These limitations include, in particular, issues related to sample size, positional error, and sampling bias. I...

Marine spatial planning (MSP) has the potential to balance demands for ocean space with environmental protection and is increasingly considered crucial for achieving global ocean goals. In theory, MSP should adhere to six principles, being: (1) ecosystem-based, (2) integrated, (3) place-based, (4) adaptive, (5) strategic, and (6) participatory. Des...

This dataset was created for the Fish2Sustainability research project, which aims to evaluate how small-scale fisheries (SSF) contribute to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The dataset includes 61 case studies across seven countries and was developed using a rapid appraisal framework. The framework includes a four-step process: Identifying sp...

1. Human pressure on ecosystems has strongly increased over the last decades and now impacts even the most remote regions. To help mitigate these impacts, it is crucial to designate protected areas in regions that retain a high level of ecological integrity. However, ecological data remain scarce for many such areas, making the systematic design of...

We ran numerical experiments for the reconstruction of sea surface turbidity dynamics using a daily 1km resolution multisensor (MODIS, VIIRS, OLCI) L3 satellite product from 2019 to 2021, off the French coast, in the western Mediterranean Sea. Here, we explored neural interpolation schemes as an approach to conduct image gap filling. Among state-of...

Abstract Marine protected area networks (MPANs) are promised as tools for protecting biodiversity and contributing to sustainable development. The variety of expected social‐ecological outcomes associated with MPANs underscores a need to consider ecological, economic, governance, and social dimensions in MPAN design, implementation, monitoring, and...

Marine spatial planning (MSP) often favors blue growth objectives over biodiversity conservation, diminishing its role in promoting sustainability. We used in-depth qualitative document analysis to assess how conservation principles and priorities are included in five case studies to identify a path for better integrating conservation with MSP. Fiv...

A socio-ecological rapid appraisal applied to measure the contributions of small-scale fisheries to Sustainable Development Goals.

Ecosystem services' (ES) assessments can inform sustainability policies but often translate poorly into practical decision-making due to their disconnection from local challenges. Problem framing is a crucial step in improving the operationalization of ecosystem studies. First, the study analyzes the challenges and opportunities for sustainability...

In recent years efforts to develop good research practices have accelerated, and issues of Reproducibility and Replicability (R & R) in computer science experiments have gained attention. Due to the complexity of the approaches used, the reproducibility of deep learning (DL) experiments is a particular challenge. Without the use of DL technology, h...

The challenges of Reproducibility and Replicability (R & R) in computer science experiments have become a focus of attention in the last decade, as efforts to adhere to good research practices have increased. However, experiments using Deep Learning (DL) remain difficult to reproduce due to the complexity of the techniques used. Challenges such as...

The challenges of Reproducibility and Replicability (R&R) have become a focus of attention in order to promote open and accessible research. Therefore, efforts have been made to develop good practices for R&R in the area of computer science. Nevertheless, Deep Learning (DL) based experiments remain difficult to reproduce by others due to the comple...

In computer science, there are more and more efforts to improve reproducibility. However, it is still difficult to reproduce the experiments of other scientists, and even more difficult when it comes to Deep Learning (DL). Making a DL research experiment reproducible requires a lot of work to document, verify, and make the system usable. These chal...

From the study of coastal hazards to the modeling of ocean currents and the mapping of marine habitats, bathymetric data are essential to the understanding and management of coastal environments. However, most of our oceans remain mapped at very coarse spatial resolutions (i.e., ~450m). While high resolution seafloor mapping technologies exist (e.g...

The Covid-19 pandemic is the latest example in a growing number of health, social, economic, and environmental crises humanity is facing. The multiple consequences of this pandemic crisis required strong responses from governments, including strict lockdowns. Yet, the impact of lockdowns on coastal ecosystems and maritime activities is still challe...

The mapping and assessment of Ecosystem Services (ES) aims at better connecting environmental conservation, economic development, and human well-being. However, 60 years after the development of the ES concept, a persistent gap remains between the production of scientific knowledge on ES and its use in support of policy and management. Here, we rep...

Accurate and reliable bathymetric data are needed for a wide diversity of marine research and management applications. Satellite-derived bathymetry represents a time saving method to map large shallow waters of remote regions compared to the current costly in situ measurement techniques. This study aims to create very high-resolution (VHR) bathymet...

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 provides a vision for the world’s oceans; however, the management interventions that are needed to achieve SDG 14 remain less clear. We assessed the potential contributions of seven key area-based management tools (such as fisheries closures) to SDG 14 targets. We conducted a rapid systematic review of 177 stud...

Seascape ecology, the marine-centric counterpart to landscape ecology, is rapidly emerging as an interdisciplinary and spatially explicit ecological science with relevance to marine management, biodiversity conservation and restoration. While important progress in this field has been made in the past decade, there has been no coherent prioritisatio...

Cumulative impact assessments can inform ecosystem-based management by mapping human pressures and assessing their intensity on ecosystem components. However, its use to inform local management is scarce, largely due to the need for fine-grained spatial data representing ecosystem threats that can assess impacts at a local scale. Here, we applied t...

Australia proclaimed a national marine protected area (MPA) system-the National Representative System of MPAs (NRSMPA). Following a change in federal government, the system underwent two major revisions: an independent review released in 2015, and a final plan designed by the Director of National Parks implemented in 2018. We used all three iterati...

Effective networks of marine protected areas (MPAs) are explicitly recognized and called for in international biodiversity conservation strategies such as the Aichi Targets. While various indicators have been proposed to assess effectiveness of individual MPAs, no comprehensive set of indicators exists for MPA networks, particularly for Aichi Targe...

• 1. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are today's cornerstone of many marine conservation strategies. Our 2015 study (Devillers et al., 2015) and others have shown, however, that the placement of MPAs is ‘residual’ to commercial uses and biased towards areas of lower economic value or interest. • 2. In this paper, we explored the impact of our study o...

Large commercial vessel traffic is expected to continue growing over the next decades, making marine habitats noisier. This additional vessel noise could prevent the recovery of endangered marine species and populations and become a threat to others. Spatially constricted areas are places where both maritime traffic and species can concentrate, inc...

As human impacts continue to threaten coastal habitats and ecosystems, marine benthic habitat and substrate mapping has become a key component of many conservation and management initiatives. Understanding the composition and extent of marine habitats can inform marine protected area (MPA) planning and monitoring, help identify vulnerable or rare h...

Marine protected area (MPA) planning often relies on scientific principles that help ensure that an area selected for conservation will effectively protect biodiversity. Capturing ecological processes in MPA network planning has received increased attention in recent years. High‐resolution seafloor maps, which show patterns in seafloor bio‐physical...

SHARE LINK (50 days free): https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aPUk5c6cKuCNn Knowing spatial and temporal patterns of species distribution is paramount to support marine species persistence. While datasets provided by global aggregators are increasingly rich and useful, they suffer from various types of data quality issues that can impact their usage....

This case study focuses on the characterization of fine-scale habitats associated with cold-water corals in three areas off Eastern Canada. Remotely operated vehicle (ROV)-based video, oceanographic, and bathymetric data were collected in 13 dives ranging from 200 to 3000 m deep at The Gully, the Flemish Cap, and the Orphan Knoll. Maps of potential...

The health of the ocean, central to human well-being, has now reached a critical point. Most fish stocks are overexploited, climate change and increased dissolved carbon dioxide are changing ocean chemistry and disrupting species throughout food webs, and the fundamental capacity of the ocean to regulate the climate has been altered. However, key t...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) design is a complex process that typically involves diverse stakeholders, requiring compromise between diverging priorities. Such compromises, when not carefully understood, can threaten the ecological effectiveness of MPAs. Using the example of the Canadian Laurentian Channel MPA, we studied a planning process from in...

This chapter provides a general introduction to the terminology used to describe the imperfections related to geographic information. This wealth of terminology, whose terms often mean different things in various fields (e.g. geomatics, geography, computer science, and mathematics), has been identified as a potential obstacle to the development of...

This chapter presents the concepts of integrity and trust in the context of the assessment of spatial data quality. It describes approaches that can be used to assess the internal and external quality of geolocated information produced by mobile objects. The first step, a bottom‐up approach, suggests assessing the integrity of information based on...

Seafloor mapping can offer important insights for marine management, spatial planning, and research in marine geology, ecology, and oceanography. Here, we present a method for generating regional bathymetry and geomorphometry maps from crowd-sourced depth soundings (Olex AS) for a small fraction of the cost of multibeam data collection over the sam...

The growth of global ocean noise recorded over the past decades is increasingly affecting marine species and requires assessment on the part of marine managers. We present a framework for the analysis of species’ exposure to noise from shipping. Integrated into a set of geovisualization tools, our approach focuses on exposure hotspot mapping, on th...

Small-scale fisheries require knowledge in decision-making, particularly as they face many of the same issues affecting large-scale, industrial fisheries, such as declining fish stocks, marine habitats degradation, resource use competition, and climate change. There are other characteristics of small-scale fisheries, however, that cause additional...

This study assesses vessel-noise exposure levels for Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW) in the Salish Sea. Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) was used to delineate SRKW summer core areas. Those areas were combined with the output of a regional cumulative noise model describing sound level variations generated by commercial vessels (1/3-octave-band...

Over the last two decades, online communities have become ubiquitous, with millions of people accessing collaborative project websites every day. Among them, the OpenStreetMap project (OSM) has been very successful in collecting/offering volunteered geographic information (VGI). Very different behaviours are observed among OSM participants, which t...

Information on the distribution of cold-water corals in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) waters largely comes from scientific multi-species trawl surveys and commercial fisheries observer programs. As a result, knowledge of coral distribution has been influenced by the type of gear used and by fishing effort distribution, leaving large knowledge gaps...

Online collaborative communities are now ubiquitous. Identifying the nature of the events that drive contributors to withdraw from a project is of prime importance to ensure the sustainability of those communities. Previous studies used ad hoc criteria to identify withdrawn contributors, preventing comparisons between results and introducing interp...

The number of people registering in an online community depends on two main factors: interest in, and awareness of, the project. Registering to a project does not, however, imply contributing to it, as lacking the knowledge and skills can be a barrier to participation. In order to identify the nature of events that might have facilitated or hindere...

Archaeologists are often considered frontrunners in employing spatial approaches within the social sciences and humanities, including geospatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) that are now routinely used in archaeology. Since the late 1980s, GIS has mainly been used to support data collection and management as well as spa...

Remote sensing techniques are currently the main methods providing elevationdata used to produce Digital Terrain Models (DTM). Terrain attributes (e.g. slope,orientation, rugosity) derived from DTMs are commonly used as surrogates of spe-cies or habitat distribution in ecological studies. While DTMs’ errors are known topropagate to terrain attribut...

Information about small-scale fisheries (SSF) is often scarce and scattered. This is partly due to insufficient attention on this sector, whose contribution to society is often assumed to be negligible. It also results from SSF being highly diverse, with complex patterns of harvest and post-harvest activities taking place in a wide range of aquatic...

Healthy oceans are essential to human survival and prosperity, yet oceans are severely impacted worldwide by anthropogenic threats including overfishing, climate change, industrialization, pollution, and habitat destruction. Marine protected areas (MPAs) have been implemented around the world and are effective conservation tools that can mitigate s...

Data acquisition artefacts are commonly found in multibeam bathymetric data, but their effects on mapping methodologies using geographic information system techniques have not been widely explored. Artefacts have been extensively studied in terrestrial settings, but their study in a marine context has currently been limited to engineering and surve...

Over 5,000 marine protected areas (MPAs) exist around the world. Most are small (median size of ∼2 km2) and designed primarily for the conservation of a single flagship species. Internationally, there is an increasing focus on ecologically representative conservation; however the contribution of these small MPAs to the protection of regional biodiv...

Terrain attributes (e.g. slope, rugosity) derived from digital terrain models are commonly used in environmental studies. The increasing availability of GIS tools that generate those attributes can lead users to select a sub-optimal combination of terrain attributes for their applications. Our objectives were to identify sets of terrain attributes...

The Atlantic Wolffish (Anarhichas lupus) is listed by Canada’s Species at Risk Act as a species of special concern. Effective conservation strategies rely on accurate knowledge of habitat requirements, distribution, and vulnerabilities; however, current management plans cite lack of wolffish habitat data as a key limitation. For this study, coastal...

A rapid review of the literature on closed areas that recognize key ecosystem-based management (EBM) principles of fisheries and biodiversity conservation and had fisher involvement was employed to review closed areas worldwide from a fisheries perspective and to develop a scorecard that can assess their efficacy. The review provided 523 abstracts...

Selecting appropriate environmental variables is a key step in ecology. Terrain attributes (e.g. slope, rugosity) are routinely used as abiotic surrogates of species distribution and to produce habitat maps that can be used in decision-making for conservation or management. Selecting appropriate terrain attributes for ecological studies may be a ch...

Additional information on the selections of variables. (PDF)

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technology has significant research potential, specifically for harsh maritime environment operations. Memorial University of Newfoundland recognized this potential and in 2005 the University commissioned an International Submarine Engineering Explorer AUV to be built. The Marine Environmental Research Lab for In...

Canada's ocean ecosystem health and functioning is critical to sustaining a strong maritime economy and resilient coastal communities. Yet despite the importance of Canada's oceans and coasts, federal ocean policy and management have diverged substantially from marine science in the past decade. In this paper, key areas where this is apparent are r...

Abstract Understanding seabed properties is increasingly important to support policy in the marine environment. Such knowledge can be gained from diverse methods, ranging from more traditional expert-interpretations of acoustic and ground-truth data, to maps resulting from fully quantitative analyses of acoustic data. This study directly compares s...

Understanding the effects of scale is essential to the understanding of natural eco - systems, particularly in marine environments where sampling is more limited and sporadic than in terrestrial environments. Despite its recognized importance, scale is rarely considered in benthic habitat mapping studies. Lack of explicit statement of scale in the...

Aim Ecological maps are increasingly used to support marine management and conservation. However, the biological datasets used to produce these maps are typically limited to taxonomic groups identified to the specific taxonomic levels available. Ecological units should, however, reflect the broader marine ecosystem, independent of the datasets used...

Tools that derive terrain attributes from digital elevation models are common in geospatial software. Their accessibility permits applying geomorphometric techniques to a wide range of applications. These tools however, can be considered " black boxes " where the analysis and comparison of the internal workings of the technique are vague and cannot...

To study the influence of inter- and intra-specific interactions on patterns of ecological segregation in nonbreeding habitat, we used geolocators to track year-round movements of congeneric and partially sympatric Thick-billed Murres (Uria lomvia (L., 1758)) and Common Murres (Uria aalge (Pontoppidan, 1763)) from seven Canadian colonies during 200...