Assistant Professor
Burnside Hall Room 424-A
805 Sherbrooke St. West
Montreal, QC, H3A 2K6, Canada
tel: 514-398-4091
fax: 514-398-7437
email: jeanine.rhemtulla@mcgill.ca
Research Focus
My research focuses on understanding the long-term interactions between human land use and ecosystem structure, composition, and functioning. In many regions of the world, the fate of human livelihoods and ecosystem functioning are irrevocably linked. People now inhabit over 75% of the planet’s ice-free land, including 80% of forests, and influence 90% of terrestrial net primary productivity. Although the goal of human land use is to provide for fundamental human needs such as food and timber, land use also affects the ability of ecosystems to maintain other critical ecosystem services. For example, land-use change is the most important cause of biodiversity loss (via habitat loss and fragmentation), and is also the second greatest source of global net CO2 emissions (primarily through tropical deforestation). Understanding the interactions between land use, livelihoods, and ecosystem functioning is thus critical to increasing human well-being while maintaining sustainable flows of all ecosystem services through time.
Given that land use can influence ecosystem functioning for hundreds to thousands of years, it is critical to examine these issues within a historical context. My research thus has three main themes: reconstructing land-use and land-cover change at local to regional scales over the past few centuries; examining the effects of land-use legacies on landscape composition and structure and the provisioning of ecosystem services such as biodiversity and carbon storage; and identifying trade-offs between human livelihoods and ecosystem services through time. I am convinced of the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to these questions, and thus collaborate with colleagues in the social sciences and humanities. I draw on theory and methods from landscape ecology and historical ecology, and employ a wide range of tools, including ecological fieldwork, household surveys, historical data sources (survey records, census data, old airphotos and satellite imagery), and spatial analysis and GIS.
Current projects
Legacies of historical land-use in Quebec: Using archival documents, census records, historical airphotos, and satellite imagery combined with fieldwork and modeling, we are mapping how the landscapes of Quebec have changed over the last several hundred years with an eye to understanding how the legacies of past land uses influence current ecosystem functioning (biodiversity, soil nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration), and what options the future holds for restoration, and managing the trade-offs between competing ecosystem services such as food production and carbon sequestration.
Poverty and Ecosystem function in the Peruvian Amazon: Working in a subsistence peasant village in the Peruvian Amazon, we are studying how poverty influences farmer’s land-use decisions, and how these decisions, in turn, affect ecosystem functioning in a swidden-fallow agroforestry system. Poorer farmers own less land, which they thus cultivate more frequently and leave in fallow for shorter periods of time. Over the past three years, we have interviewed farmers and mapped their fields to examine the spatial evolution of land-use, economic inequality, and landscape composition and configuration. We are currently carrying out fieldwork to assess the implications of these changes for biodiversity, soil fertility, and the potential feedbacks between poverty, fallow length, and declining ecosystem functioning.
Homegardens in India: We are slowly beginning some work in Kerala, southern India, to examine changes in homegardens due to the rapid expansion of rubber and other cash crops.