Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques

Concordia University Montreal · Department of Geography, Planning and Environment

The knowledge of forest carbon stock plays a crucial role in understanding and addressing the environmental, climate, and sustainability challenges associated with forest ecosystems. This study focuses on the Forest Carbon Stock (FCS) in the Congo Basin Forests (CBFs), the second largest tropical rainforest in the world. The study aims to address s...

Severe flooding occurred in 1974, 1976, 2017 and 2019 in the Ottawa River Basin (ORB), Canada. The floods of 2017 and 2019 resulted in the evacuation of ~14,000 persons and at least ~$1 billion in costs for governments alone. As a result of the economic damage of the floods, there has been much discussion as to whether the 2017 and 2019 floods are...

Flood frequency analysis assumes that annual peak flood events occur independently of each other, regardless of previous flood events (the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption); however, annual peak flood records do not necessarily appear to conform to these assumptions. We tested the i.i.d assumption by analyzing the effects...

We used a high-resolution lacustrine pollen record from Étang Fer-de-Lance (45°21′21.9′N, 72°13′35.3′W), southeastern Québec, Canada, together with microcharcoal, to infer forest dynamics and human impacts over the past 2300 years. The lake is located in the eastern sugar maple-basswood forest domain of the Northern Temperate Forest of eastern Nort...

Knowledge of present-day spatial and temporal distribution of water resources is vital for successful water management and policies for planned adaptation to climate change. Measured quantities of hydroclimatic variables, including precipitation, evapotranspiration, streamflow, etc., are the primary indicators of water availability, and indices der...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Across the Upper Missouri River Basin, the recent drought of 2000 to 2010, known as the “turn-of-the-century drought,” was likely more severe than any in the instrumental record including the Dust Bowl drought. However, until now, adequate proxy records needed to better understand this event with regard to long-term variability have been lacking. H...

A comprehensive database of paleoclimate records is needed to place recent warming into the longer-term context of natural climate variability. We present a global compilation of quality-controlled, published, temperature-sensitive proxy records extending back 12,000 years through the Holocene. Data were compiled from 679 sites where time series co...

Fire is a critical ecosystem process that has played a key role in shaping forests throughout the Beartooth Mountains in northwestern Wyoming. The highly variable topography of the area provides ideal conditions to compare fire regimes across contiguous forest types, yet pyro-dendrochronological research in this area is limited. We reconstructed fi...

We assess how weather events on the Canadian Prairies during the 2012 growing season were temporally and spatially represented by a high-resolution, non-World Meteorological Organization (WMO) standard private provider network, Earth Networks (EN), relative to the WMO standard climate stations operated by federal and provincial governments. We foun...

Paleohydrologic records can provide unique, long-term perspectives on streamflow variability and hydroclimate for use in water resource planning. Such long-term records can also play a key role in placing both present day events and projected future conditions into a broader context than that offered by instrumental observations. However, relative...

IUGG19-4694 We present an assessment of current and 21st century projected changes in temperature, precipitation and total runoff over the Athabasca River Basin (ARB) of North Central Alberta, and calculate the associated climate moisture index (CMI, a measure of effective moisture) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI,...

A synthesis of 93 hydrologic records from across North and Central America, and adjacent tropical and Arctic islands, reveals centennial to millennial trends in the regional hydroclimates of the Common Era (CE; past 2000 years). The hydrological records derive from materials stored in lakes, bogs, caves, and ice from extant glaciers, which have the...

Successful economies, and sustainable communities, are adapted to the historical mean state of the climate of the region and, to a large extent, to the historical interannual and seasonal variability, with which there is much experience. This adaptation involves familiar strategies, for example, irrigation, and the corresponding policies, programs,...

Despite the importance of the Missouri River for navigation, recreation, habitat, hydroelectric power, and agriculture, relatively little is known about the basic hydroclimatology of the Missouri River basin (MRB). This is of particular concern given the droughts and floods that have occurred over the past several decades and the potential future e...

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all conti...

A synthesis of 93 hydrologic records from across North and Central America, and adjacent tropical and Arctic islands, reveals centennial to millennial trends in the regional hydroclimates of the Common Era (CE; past 2000 years). The hydrological records derive from materials stored in lakes, bogs, caves, and ice from extant glaciers, which have the...

We analyzed annual peak flow series from 127 naturally flowing or naturalized streamflow gauges across western Canada to examine the impact of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) on annual flood risk, which has been previously unexamined in detail. Using Spearman's rank correlation ρ and permutation tests on quantile-quantile plots, we show that...

The South Saskatchewan River Basin is one of Canada's most threatened watersheds, with water supplies in most subbasins over-allocated. In 2013, stakeholders representing irrigation districts, the environment, and municipalities collaborated with researchers and consultants to explore opportunities to improve the resiliency of the management of the...

Fossil pollen assemblages are widely used to reconstruct past vegetation community composition at time scales ranging from centuries to millennia. These reconstructions often are based on the observed relationships between the proportions of plant taxa in the source vegetation and the proportions of the corresponding pollen types in pollen assembla...

A vital component of paleoclimatology is the validation of paleoclimatological reconstructions. Unfortunately for proxy validation, there is scant instrumental data prior to the 20th century available for the validation of reconstructions. Hence, in practice, we typically do long-term validation using other proxy-inferred climate reconstructions. H...

Significance We show that current and projected surface water allocations from the Athabasca River, Alberta, Canada, for the exploitation of the Alberta oil sands are based upon an untenable assumption of the representativeness of the short instrumental gauge record. Our trend analysis of the instrumental data shows declining regional flows. Our tr...

The inference of past temperatures from a sedimentary pollen record depends upon the stationarity of the pollen-climate relationship. However, humans have altered vegetation independent of changes to climate, and consequently modern pollen deposition is a product of landscape disturbance and climate, which is different from the dominance of climate...

Successful economies, and sustainable communities, are adapted to the historical mean state of the climate of the region and, to a large extent, to the historical interannual and seasonal variability, with which there is much experience. This adaptation involves familiar strategies, for example, irrigation, and the corresponding policies, programs,...

The 2013 floods across southern Alberta, Canada, are considered to be one of the worst natural disasters in recent Canadian history. This region is highly vulnerable to flooding during spring as the frozen ground restricts infiltration and the melting snow directly contributes to streamflow. Studies have concluded that the 2013 floods in Alberta we...

Across the southern Canadian Prairies, annual precipitation is relatively low (200–400 mm) and periodic water deficits limit economic and environmental productivity. Rapid population growth, economic development and climate change have exposed this region to increasing vulnerability to hydrologic drought. There is high demand for surface water, str...

1. Peak flows are characterized by the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the magnitude of annual peak flow is typically much higher during the cool phase of the PDO. 2. Though ENSO by itself did not affect the annual peak flows, La Niña episodes within the cool phase of PDO produced higher magnitude floods. 3. Therefore, the assu...

Successful economies, and sustainable communities, are adapted to the historical mean state of the climate of the region and, to a large extent, to the historical interannual and seasonal variability, with which there is much experience. This adaptation involves familiar strategies, for example, irrigation, and the corresponding policies, programs,...

The present-day hydroclimatology of the central Rocky Mountains is heavily influenced by recurring large-scale climate patterns: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation (AO/NAO). Hence, low frequency central Rocky Mountain river discharge variability can b...

The 20th century hydroclimatology of northwestern North America has been linked to naturally recurring large-scale climate patterns such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Few observed hydroclimatic records from this region exceed in length the w60-year periodicity of the lower frequency climate os...

The 20 th century hydroclimatology of the northern Rocky Mountains is heavily influenced by recurring large-scale climate patterns: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation (AO/NAO). Hence, northern Rocky Mountain river discharge variability can be successf...

The climatology and hydrology of western North America display strong periodic cycles which are correlated with the low-frequency Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO's signature is seen throughout the entire North Pacific region, with related significant associations to hydrology and ecology in western North America and northeastern Asia. Th...

The existence of western North American multi-decadal droughts, and even centennial-length megadroughts, and their impacts on Native cultures and civilizations are being increasingly appreciated. These exceptionally severe and long-lasting droughts have barely been experienced by European settler cultures in North America, but have been fully exper...

The detection and attribution of past variability and trends in hydrological variables are essential for the understanding the impacts of climate change and prudent water management. In the Canadian western interior, interannual to multidecadal variation in precipitation and temperature are heavily influenced by recurring large-scale climate patter...

The 20th century hydroclimatology of the northern Rocky Mountains is heavily influenced by recurring large-scale climate patterns: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation (AO/NAO). Hence, northern Rocky Mountain river discharge variability can be successfu...

The 20th century hydroclimatology of the Pacific Northwest has been linked to natural recurring large-scale climate patterns such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Tree-ring proxy data analyses carried out in western North America has proven valuable to quantify natural climate variation over cent...

The ˜60 year Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a major factor controlling streamflow in the northern Rocky Mountains, causing dryness during its positive phase, and wetness during its negative phase. If the PDO’s influence is not incorporated into a trend analysis of streamflows, it can produce detected declines that are actually artifacts of th...

Recent research on the detection of climate change trends in the northern Rocky Mountains has concluded that the region is running out of water due to global warming. Reaching such a conclusion from the analysis of instrumental streamflow records is problematic, given the short length and discontinuity of most gauge records, human impacts, and resi...

Sediments from South Lake, Brock Plateau (Melville Hills), Northwest Territories, provide one of the longest postglacial records from the mainland western Canadian Arctic, outside of eastern Beringia. Sedimentation commenced at least 13 900 cal. yr BP, and possibly as early as 16 000 cal. yr BP, in response to early deglaciation of the site. Pollen...

A high-resolution, independent pollen-inferred paleoclimate record and direct algal seasonality data from the actual time of sediment deposition are used to interpret the high-resolution diatom and chrysophyte record of varved Lake Mina, west-central Minnesota, USA during AD 1116—2002. This direct algal seasonality information was obtained by split...

Sediments from South Lake, Brock Plateau (Melville Hills), Northwest Territories, provide one of the longest postglacial records from the mainland western Canadian Arctic, outside of eastern Beringia. Sedimentation commenced at least 13,900 cal yr B.P., possibly as early as 15,000 cal yr B.P. in response to early deglaciation of the site. Pollen is...

Increasing surface air temperatures from anthropogenic forcing are melting permafrost in high latitudes and intensifying the hydrological cycle. Long-term streamflow records (at least 30 yrs) from 23 stream gauges in the Canadian Northwest Territories (NWT) indicate a general significant upward trend in baseflow of 0.5- 271.6 %/yr and the beginning...

We developed a fast, inexpensive, statistically rigorous method of varve verification that uses prospective varve layer-splitting and seasonal pollen deposition. This method can be used on any sediment that contains seasonally deposited pollen, and avoids the need for radio-isotopic, optical, or thermoluminescence dating. The method uses a χ2 test...

Drought is endemic to the North American Great Plains, causing severe economic consequences. However, instrumental climate data only exist from ca AD 1890, and limited tree-ring, paleolimnological, archeological and eolian records document the last two millennia. To address this lack of monitoring and paleoclimatic data, the pollen preserved in the...

Aim The bias in modern North American pollen assemblages by landscape disturbance from Euro-American settlement has long been overlooked in the construction of pollen–climate transfer functions. Our aim is to examine this problem and to develop an unbiased pre-settlement pollen–climate transfer function, and to test its performance and inference po...

Fish introductions are one of the most widespread anthropogenic perturbations to aquatic ecosystems. Paradoxically, the effects of these introductions on aquatic ecosystems are typically poorly documented. This project studied the effect of fish introductions on Lake Opeongo, an oligotrophic lake in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada (45° 4...

Terrestrial ecosystem disturbances inferred from the fossil hemlock pollen decline (ca. 4,800 BP) and recovery (ca. 3,800 BP) affected van Nostrand Lake, including the diatom communities. Ecological models suggest the lake responded by eutrophying, reflecting higher nutrient influx resulting from increased erosion. A decline in lake productivity fo...

The information capacity of general forms of memory is formalized. The number of bits of information that can be stored in the Hopfield model of associative memory is estimated. It is found that the asymptotic information capacity of a Hopfield network of N neurons is of the order N^{3} b. The number of arbitrary state vectors that can be made st...

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Toronto, 2000. Includes bibliographical references.