Current Lab Members

Julie Fortin
Final year undergraduate (B.Sc. Honours Earth System Science)

Bayesian Updating of Land Cover Classifications

My project involves assessing landscape change including deforestation in Brazil, forest fires in northern Quebec and urban expansion in Las Vegas. To accomplish this, I take loads of land cover data from a wide variety of sources, do regression tree classifications on them using Google Earth Engine, and run them through an algorithm we created in R which applies bayesian statistics to update those classifications.

Fun fact: I'm captain of the McGill Figure Skating team!
David Pelletier
MSc Candidate (Department of Natural Resource Sciences)

My research interests are in landscape connectivity and forest fragmentation. I used to be a system administrator and web developer before doing the jump into physical geography and landscape ecology. As such, my research centers on computer modelling and automating tasks to process large quantities of spatial data. My main project involves using the Circuitscape software to model omnidirectional connectivity at high resolution over very large areas, such as administrative regions and even the whole extent forested areas in Canada. The resulting connectivity maps can be used to prioritize areas for conservation and preservation as well as guide commercial activities such as logging.

David Pelletier est étudiant à la maîtrise au campus Macdonald de l'université McGill en écologie du paysage. Il a travaillé près de 10 ans en informatique en tant qu’administrateur réseau, designer et programmeur web et expert en accessibilité du web pour les personnes aveugles et handicappées avant d’effectuer un retour aux études en géographie physique. Il s’intéresse principalement à la connectivité du paysage à petites et à grandes échelles ainsi qu’aux défis que représente la fragmentation des forêts. Il utilise les systèmes d’information géographique, des modèles et programme des outils pour automatiser le traitement de grandes quantités de données géographiques.
Jacky Lee
MSc Candidate (Department of Natural Resource Sciences)

Research Interests: Landscape ecology, Remote sensing, spatial ecology, community ecology, invasion ecology. 

Humans are causing extraordinary changes in our environment from changes in land use to introduction of invasive species. It is important then to track these changes and identify areas where we are able to target conservation efforts to conserve biodiversity. As technology has improved to the point where it is now possible to see time lapse changes in landscape using remote sensing techniques in real time. Furthermore increases in open databases of maps has allowed for an unprecedented access to large number of satellite pictures. Google Earth Engine is one of such open databases which allows access to a large number of satellite maps. My MSc thesis will focus on a recently developed method of updating landcover classification maps to track changes in the classifications. I am developing the tools needed in Google Earth Engine to quickly update classifications.
Xavier Giroux-Bougard
PhD Student (Department of Natural Resource Sciences)

Research Interests: Landscape genetics, landscape ecology, functional connectivity, spatial ecology

As the configuration and spatial structure of landscapes change, conservation biology and wildlife management are ever more concerned with the degree of flow and movement of individuals within and between wildlife populations, defined as functional connectivity. Understanding how species use habitat to disperse and migrate is critical in assessing the long-term viability of their populations as well as developing improved tools to identify areas which significantly contribute to the connectivity of the landscape. My research focuses on optimizing models of landscape connectivity using population genetic data as a proxy for long term wildlife movements at large scales. Specifically, I am interested in: (1) understanding how individual species respond to large disturbances in a landscape (forestry, forest fires, etc...), (2) understanding how much time it takes to restore the functional connectivity of a disturbed landscape, and (3) developing new tools to build landscape connectivity models which optimize the functional connectivity of multiple species.
Valerie Hayot-Sasson
Final year BCompSci; BSc. Environmental Biology

Project Title: Landscape connectivity using Circuitscape.

The project I am working on involves creating skeletons based on Circuitscape's landscape connectivity results. This is accomplished by inputting a raster with resistance values into Circuitscape and applying image processing techniques to create the skeleton.
Max Zworth
Second Year Undergraduate (B.A.Sc. Interfaculty Environment)

I serve as general support for a number of projects underway in the lab. I am assisting with the editing process of the newest publication of the textbook Learning Landscape Ecology, by test-running exercises, programs and projects designed by Professor Cardille to assist graduate and undergraduate students with the study of computational landscape ecology. I also helped build this website.