Clément Hardy
Clément Hardy
Latest posts
Using Python properly for your research
This article was not written using AI. It’s a text I wrote to help other students in my lab learn to use Python, as most people in ecology are rather used to R. Python is a wonderful programming language : it’s fast, it’s quite easy to read and write, it has a lot of awesome packages for scientific purposes, and it’s a very mature language with a lot of users. In fact, it…
Climate is stronger than you think - Exploring functional planting and TRIAD zoning for increased forest resilience to extreme disturbances
📊 🏆 Modeling the future of forests and moose habitat at the mixedwood-boreal interface with LANDIS-II (CEF)
🏆 This presentation won the “Best presentation” award for this annual symposium of the CEF . The composition of Quebec’s forests is likely to be altered by climate change, impacting not only the flora but also the fauna that depends on them. As part of the Canada-wide DIVERSE project, we set out to predict the impact of these changes on moose habitat quality in a 4 million…
Land sparing and sharing patterns in forestry - exploring even-aged and uneven-aged management at the landscape scale
In the shadow of Jevons
This post is a translation of an article I wrote for a science communication contest. See here to know more. What if our cars used less gaz? And our telephones less electricity? What if we replaced letters with e-mails? Would that help solve the ecological crisis? Certainly not, says a book that’s almost two centuries old. Jevons paradox In 1865, Williams Stanley Jevons published a book…
🎥 🏆 The future of forests
In 2023, the NSERC (an organisation of the federal government of Canada that finances scientific research) launched another edition of their “ Science Action ! ” contest. The pitch was simple, yet challenging : graduate students who participated had to produce a 1 minute video showcasing their research in an interesting way, which would be evaluated by different juries. I participated…
📝 🥈 In the shadow of Jevons - When efficiency brings environmental destruction (French)
A yearly science communication contest is held by a gathering of several research groups of the UQAM, the pôle ISE-CIRODD-RIISQ. The theme of the 2023 edition of the contest was Transitions, decarbonization and resilience . I participated with a very short article talking about Jevons paradox and its implications concerning the consumption of more effective products and “green” (e.g.…
A LANDIS-II extension for simulating forest road networks
Global change risks a threatened species due to alteration of predator–prey dynamics
📺 Documentary - La bataille pour la forêt
The forests in Quebec are facing a lot of different pressures, resulting in different stakeholders arguing for different actions to help them. As a result, Savoir Media (a quebec TV channel) made a documentary regarding the issue. I was briefly interview during one of the episodes of the documentary, to talk about my current research regarding the impact of potential new ways to manage…
🎥 ComSciCon-QC 2022 - Is intensive forestry a catastrophy, or an opportunity ? (French)
The ComSciCon is an amazing series of workshops and conferences made to help students of science communicate their research better through many different media. In Québec, the ComSciCon-QC is now organized every year by brave volonteers. I participated at the 2022 edition at the UDEM in Montréal. For the occasion, every participant had to produce a work of science communication that would be…
Elden Ring and the Yerkes-Dodson law
Here I was, a lowly tarnished in search of the legendary Elden Ring. Against me was the strength and cunning of a whole fantasy world that wanted me dead, dead, and dead again. Every enemy, encounter and trap carefully planned and placed to crush me and my foolish ambitions by video-game designers half a world away. Armed with my sword, I launched myself at a huge armored knight towering before me…
Book review : Love and Rage, The Path of Liberation through Anger by Lama Rod Owens
Recommendation : ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Love and Rage is a call to accepting and appreciating our anger, rather than distrust and avoid it. But why should we do such a thing, when anger is precisely the source of so many of our problems ? Only a true buddhist could sit through this paradox. But luckily, that’s what Rod Owens did, and what he shares with us through this wonderful book. While reading Love and…
Hypothesis and predictions
“That’s a prediction, not an hypothesis” read the comment of one of my co-author. He was right : what I did present as one of the hypotheses of my research paper was, in fact, a prediction. But then, I started to notice that a majority of the articles I read seemed to do the same mistake. A couple of days ago, I read the following in a recent article in ecology (which I’m…
Veganism and climate change
So called “vegan” diets and lifestyle have been a subject of debate, controversy, but also interest those past few years. The number of people trying this lifestyle have been soaring in the last decade ; activists have been publishing more and more well-known documentaries revealing the dark side of animal agriculture ; and many scientific studies have been advocating for the potential…
Is Veganism the best way to reduce carbon emissions?
L'aménagement forestier inéquien : Solution ou mirage d'une foresterie durable ?
📊 Simulating forest roads is necessary to determine the impacts of forest management on habitat amount and fragmentation (QCBS)
Uneven-aged forest management is perceived as offering attractive trade-offs between wood production, and other important ecosystem services. But uncertainties persist about its impacts, due to the distribution of harvesting areas and the construction of forest roads over larger areas than the most traditional even-aged development. We have been exploring these impacts on the composition and…
3 types of software you should start using for your research
As human knowledge accumulates and our daily lives become ever more busy, it’s not wonder that we start feeling overwelmed as researchers. Our human brain might be an amazing tool to discover and understand the world around us when compared to a cat’s or a dog’s equivalent, but it is still both biased and limited. Luckily, there exist many different tools that can help us to…
📊 Long-term impacts of uneven-aged development on the quantity and fragmentation of old-growth forest in a landscape (University of Alaska Fairbank)
Uneven-aged management is currently seen by many forest ecologists as an extensive management approach when compared to more traditional even-aged methods, offering interesting compromises between timber production and other important ecosystem services. But uncertainties remain concerning its impacts on longer time periods and broader spatial scales, where harvesting activities and forest roads…
The Open-source and Organisation workshop
📑 Description A free workshop to help people discover open-source software, in order to better organize themselves and the information they come in contact with on a daily basis. You can do it by yourself in an afternoon’s time by doing the guided exercises and documentation at https://klemet.github.io/Workshop-Organization-EN/ .
📊 🏆 Long-term impacts of uneven-aged development on the quantity and fragmentation of old-growth forest in a landscape (IBFRA)
🏆 This presentation won the “Best presentation” award for this annual conference of the IBFRA . Uneven-aged management is currently seen by many forest ecologists as an extensive management approach when compared to more traditional even-aged methods, offering interesting compromises between timber production and other important ecosystem services. But uncertainties remain concerning…
📊 Simulating forest roads is necessary to determine the impacts of forest management on habitat amount and fragmentation (ESA)
Uneven-aged forest management is currently seen by many forest ecologists as an extensive management approach offering interesting compromises between timber production and other important ecosystem services related to biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, and social acceptability. While benefits of uneven-aged management have been reported at the stand-scale and for short time periods,…
🛠 Organization and open-source workshop
Our modern lives put us in constant contact with information. So much information that it can be very difficult to structure it, but also to find it. Different softwares exist today to lighten the work that we ask our brains to manage this information. However, these programs are often owned by large corporations that are unclear about whether they have access to the stored data, and whether they…
🛠 Workshop to learn to use the FRS module for LANDIS-II
The Forest Roads Simulation (FRS) module is an extension of the LANDIS-II Forest Landscape Model (FLM). It was created so as to help researchers in ecology to take into account the constructions of forest roads when studying the impacts of forest management on forest landscapes. To learn more, see https://klemet.github.io/frs-module-workshop/ .
📊 🏆 Long-term impacts of uneven-aged development on the quantity and fragmentation of old-growth forest in a landscape (CEF)
🏆 This presentation won the “Best presentation” award for this annual symposium of the CEF . Uneven-aged management is currently seen by many forest ecologists as an extensive management approach when compared to more traditional even-aged methods, offering interesting compromises between timber production and other important ecosystem services. But uncertainties remain concerning its…
📊 Long term impacts of uneven-aged management
Daily Activity Patterns and Co-Occurrence of Duikers Revealed by an Intensive Camera Trap Survey across Central African Rainforests
Connectivity Analysis scripts and tools
📑 Description A set of Python and R scripts to help you do a 4 stages connectivity analysis for terrestrial non-flying species in a Landscape. All scripts are heavily commented to indicate what to do and what’s happenning. All of the analysis rely on a raster map that indicates the resistance cost of deplacement for the given species; in the current script, this map is generated with the…
MHS-CBAU (Magic Harvest Scripting - Canadian Business As Usual)
📑 Description MHS-CBAU is a an approach to simulate a Business-As-Usual forest management in Canadian lanscapes that are simulated with the LANDIS-II model and its Magic Harvest extension. In essence, it is made to simulate harvesting in LANDIS-II simulations in Canadian landscapes . MHS-CBAU works through a specific Python script (available in this repository) that is called by Magic Harvest…
The Forest Roads Simulation module for LANDIS-II
📑 Description The FRS (Forest Roads Simulation) module is an extension for the LANDIS-II model. It allows any user to dynamically simulate the evolution of the forest road network in the simulated landscape of LANDIS-II. It does so by creating roads to cells that are harvested by a harvest module (such as Base Harvest or Biomass Harvest ), while reducing the costs of construction of roads as much…
The Magic Harvest extension for LANDIS-II
📑 Description Magic Harvest is an extension for the LANDIS-II model. It allows users to dynamically change the parameters of the Biomass Harvest extension of LANDIS-II during a simulation, by running a command to call another program during the simulation. This command can edit the parameters files as wanted (for exemple, by calling a R or Python script). Magic Harvest then forces the harvest…
📊 The influence of forest road networks on the long term impacts of uneven-aged management
Uneven-aged forest management is currently seen by many forest ecologists as an extensive management approach offering interesting compromises between timber production and other important ecosystem services such as biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, and social acceptability. While the benefits of uneven-aged management have been reported at the stand-scale and on short time periods,…
📊 Roads to conservation
The caribou (Rangifer tarandus) faces many different pressures throughout Québec, making it a vulnerable species. In particular, forest roads, numerous throughout the province, increase caribou mortality. Indeed, forest roads increase predation by the grey wolf (Canis lupus) that uses them to move quickly through the landscape to track its prey. Moreover, forest roads also increase habitat…
The Forest Road Network Plugin for QGIS
📑 Description This plugin contains several algorithms destined to help the user create an optimized forest road network, based on the topography of the landscape. The user must first create or input a “cost map”, which describes the cost of construction of a road on a pixel. Then, different algorithms allows the user to create the road network, then simulate the fluxes of wood going…
📊 A new LANDIS-II module to study the effects of roads on forest landscapes
LANDIS-II is a spatially explicit model to simulate the evolution of a forest landscape represented by a raster. Each cell in it represents a piece of the surface of it, and the LANDIS-II user can choose from different extensions in order to represent processes that impact the plant succession of the landscape forests. Currently, the existing extensions make it possible to model forest fires,…
📊 How do I cut this forest landscape for you? - Influence of space tessellation methods on modeling in forest ecology
In recent decades, thanks to the increase in the computational capabilities of our computers, the fields of ecology and forestry have seen the appearance of new tools within them. Among these are spatially explicit models, in which processes and represented entities are placed in space. These models, now widely used and developed in number, then make it possible to simulate different scenarios to…