La fragmentation des habitats ainsi que la réduction de leur disponibilité sont des menaces importantes pour les écosystèmes, notamment aquatiques. La disponibilité et la qualité des sites de fraie du saumon Atlantique peut donc être limitante dans certaines rivières. Après la migration en rivière, les femelles saumon vont chercher à s'établir dans un des sites de fraie disponibles. La distribution spatiale des femelles va alors influer sur la distribution spatiale des mâles reproducteurs qui vont chercher soit à monopoliser plusieurs femelles (pour les mâles dominants), soit à les approcher en adoptant un comportement "furtif" (pour les mâles satellites). L'accès des mâles aux femelles va donc dépendre de la distribution spatiale des femelles et des déplacements des mâles dans la rivière. La distribution des femelles va également jouer sur la distribution spatiale des juvéniles, les concentrant à certains endroits. Cette concentration peut augmenter la mortalité densité-dépendante qui modifie la dynamique de la population. Cette thèse avait pour but d'évaluer comment l'utilisation de l'espace des potentiels reproducteurs, c'est à dire les individus matures, influence la dynamique de la population et la sélection sexuelle.Des séries temporelles de stock (oeufs déposés) et de recrutement (juvéniles) pour la population de saumon de la Nivelle ont été associées à des mesures de l'agrégation spatiale des nids creusés par les femelles. L'effet des déplacements et de la distribution des reproducteurs sur leur participation à la reproduction a notamment été testé via la reconstruction du réseau d'interactions sexuelles dans la Nivelle.J'ai ainsi démontré que l'agrégation spatiale des nids influa sur la variabilité du recrutement mais pas sur le recrutement moyen. Cette agrégation qui résulte de l'agrégation des femelles a également été liée au nombre de reproducteurs ayant engendrés des juvéniles. Le réseau d'interactions sexuelles a permis de mettre en évidence une structure sociale locale au sein de la population. Cette structure et les compétiteurs présents pouvaient par exemple diminuer le succès reproducteur des mâles. Notamment, les tacons matures qui participent à la reproduction avant de migrer en mer renforçaient la compétition sexuelle dont les mâles dominants faisaient l'objet. Enfin, ces mêmes tacons matures adoptèrent des comportements spatiaux du fait de leur statut de maturité avec des individus bougeant peu et des individus se déplaçant vers l'amont. Ces comportements spatiaux influaient leur participation à la reproduction, l'étendue des domaines de vie et les déplacements vers l'amont augmentaient la probabilité de rencontrer une femelle.Mes résultats m'ont permis de mettre en évidence l'effet de l'utilisation de l'espace des potentiels reproducteurs sur la dynamique de la population et sur la sélection sexuelle. Ainsi, en combinant différentes échelles spatiales et temporelles il a été montré que l'agrégation des femelles pouvait être bénéfique pour la dynamique de la population. Il semble que les femelles tendent à s'agréger d'abord sur les meilleurs sites de fraie avec une plus forte stabilité environnementale. Cette distribution des femelles affecta la capacité des mâles à monopoliser plusieurs femelles, une agrégation modérée permettant une monopolisation. La participation des mâles furtifs anadromes ou tacons matures était également dépendante de l'agrégation des femelles. Il apparait que la disponibilité d'habitats adéquats pour la reproduction semble limitante dans la Nivelle et notamment du fait de la présence de barrages. Ce manque semble affecter le système d'appariement de la population et la sélection sexuelle y opérant. Des mesures visant à améliorer la qualité des sites de fraie déjà disponibles ainsi que leur accessibilité pourraient être envisagées. / Habitat fragmentation and reduction in the availability of suitable habitats are significant threats to ecosystems in particularly for freshwater ones. For instance, accessibility, availability, and quality of breeding sites of Atlantic salmon, \textit{Salmo salar}, can be restricting in some rivers due to human activities and dams. Such threats may affect distribution of potential breeders because after their up-river migration, salmon females distribute within available breeding sites. Spatial distribution of females determines the spatial distribution of breeder males. Dominant males try to monopolise several females, whereas subordinate males adopt a sneaky behaviour. Access to females by males depends on the spatial distribution of females and on males' displacements within a river. The spatial distribution of females generates the spatial distribution of juveniles, aggregating them at some breeding sites. The latter aggregation of juveniles may raise the density-dependent mortality with potential consequences on population dynamics. The thesis aims to assess how space use of potential breeders, namely mature individuals able to spawn or fertilise eggs, influence population dynamics and sexual selection.I combined different approaches and different temporal and spatial scales to potential effects of space use of potential breeders. Time series of stock (deposited eggs) and of recruitment (juveniles) for the salmon population of the Nivelle River were combined with measures of spatial aggregation of nests. The effects of displacements and spatial distribution of potential breeders on their participation in reproduction were tested through inferring the sexual network of the population.I found that spatial aggregation of nests improved the recruitment variability but did not affect the average recruitment. The spatial aggregation of nests resulting from female aggregation was also linked to the number of effective breeders through a U-shaped curve. Such relationships suggested mate monopolization dependent on the spatial aggregation of females. The negative effect of the spatial isolation of females on their number of mates also suggest such mate monopolization. Then, the inferred sexual network enabled me to highlight a local social structure within the population. The latter structure and social competitors impacted the reproductive success of anadromous males. The participation of mature parr was one of the factors diminishing the sexual competition faced by anadromous males. Finally, mature parr were more mobile and moved more upstream than immature parr. Spatial behaviours of mature parr were linked to their participation in reproduction, individuals exhibiting wider home ranges had a higher probability to encounter females.Altogether my results show that space use of potential breeders affect both population dynamics and sexual selection. Then, spatial aggregation of females and of their nests can be beneficial for population dynamics as shown by combining different temporal and spatial scales. Females seemed to aggregate within the best breeding sites with a better environmental stability. The spatial distribution of females affected the ability of males to monopolise several females and participation of sneaky males. The availability of suitable good breeding habitats seemed restricting in the Nivelle, potentially due to the presence of impassable upstream dams. The lack of suitable breeding sites seemed impacting the mating system of the population and the sexual selection operating in. Some management actions to improve the quality of breeding sites and their availability could be planned.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This thesis deals with out-of-equilibrium transport phenomena in strongly correlated low-dimensional fermionic systems, with special emphasis on π-conjugated molecular materials. The focus of this work is to study real-time dynamics of spin and charge transport in these systems in order to investigate non-equilibrium transport in single-molecule electronic and spintronic devices. Chapter 1 describes the electronic structure and dynamics of strongly correlated fermionic systems in general, and in one-dimension, in particular. For this purpose, effective low-energy model Hamiltonians (used in this work) are discussed. Whenever applicable, approximate analytical and numerical methods commonly used in the literature to deal with these model Hamiltonians, are outlined. In the context of one-dimensional strongly correlated fermionic systems, analytical techniques like the Bethe ansatz and bosonization, and numerical procedures like exact diagonalization and DMRG, used for solving finite systems, are discussed in detail. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the different zero-temperature (T = 0) time-dependent DMRG algorithms, which have been used to study out-of-equilibrium time-dependent phenomena in low-dimensional strongly correlated systems. In Chapter 3 we employ the time-dependent DMRG algorithm proposed by Luo, Xiang and Wang [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 049701 (2003)], to study the role of dimerization and electronic correlations on the dynamics of spin-charge separation. We employ the H¨uckel and Hubbard models for our studies. We have modified the algorithm proposed by Luo et. al to overcome some of its limitations. Chapter 4 presents a generalized adaptive time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) scheme developed by us, called the Double Time Window Targeting (DTWT) technique, which is capable of giving accurate results with lesser computational resources than required by the existing methods. This procedure originates from the amalgamation of the features of pace keeping DMRG algorithm, first proposed by Luo et. al, [Phys.Rev. Lett. 91, 049701 (2003)], and the time-step targeting (TST) algorithm by Feiguin and White [Phys. Rev. B 72, 020404 (2005)]. In chapter 5 we apply the Double Time Window Targeting (DTWT) technique, which was discussed in the previous chapter, for studying real-time quantum dynamics of spin-charge separation in π-conjugated polymers. We employ the Pariser-Parr-Pople (PPP) model which has long-range electron-electron interactions. For investigating real-time dynamics of spin and charge transport, we inject a hole at one end of polyene chains of different lengths and study the temporal evolution of its spin and charge degrees of freedom, using the DTWT td-DMRG algorithm. Chapter 6 we investigate the effect of terminal substituents on the dynamics of spin and charge transport in donor-acceptor substituted polyenes (D- (CH)x- A) chains, also known as push-pull polyenes. We employ long-range correlated model Hamiltonian for the D- (CH)x- A system and, real-time DMRG dynamics for time propagating the wave packet obtained by injecting a hole at a terminal site in the ground state of the system. Our studies reveal that the end groups do not affect the spin and charge velocities in any significant way, but change the amount of charge transported. We have compared these with the polymethineimine (CN)x system in which besides electron affinities, the nature of pz orbitals in conjugation also alternate from site to site. Chapter 7 presents our investigation on the effect of static electron-phonon coupling (dimerization) on the dynamics of spin-charge separation in particular, and transport in general, in π-conjugated polyene chains. The polyenes are modeled by the Pariser-Parr-Pople Hamiltonian, having long-range electron-electron correlations. Our studies reveal that spin and charge velocities depend both on the chain length and dimerization. The spin and charge velocities increase as dimerization increases, but the amount of charge and spin transported along the chain decrease with enhancement in dimerization. Furthermore, in the range 0.3≤ δ≤0.5, it is observed that the dynamics of spin-charge separation becomes complicated, and the charge degree of freedom is affected more by electron-phonon coupling compared to the spin degree of freedom.

<p>It might be time for critics of early Canadian literature to avoid avoiding blackness in early Canada in their work. This dissertation<em> </em>takes up the recurrent pattern of displacement that emerges in critical studies that recall or rediscover early Canada. It attends in particular to the displacements and subordinations of Canadian blackness, particularly those conspicuously avoided by critics or rendered conspicuously absent by authors in the literatures of Upper Canada during the height of the Underground Railroad era, between 1830 and 1860. Not only is blackness in Upper Canada concealed, omitted, derided, and caricatured, but these representational formulas shape the hegemonic common-sense of what Antonio Gramsci terms “the national popular.” I argue that canonical texts contain accounts of early Canadian blackness from the national popular and subsequent criticisms of them produce an attitude and a history that excises blackness when literary and cultural critics examine the complexities of early Canada. Informed by Stuart Hall’s concept of the “floating signifier,” I draw the tropes of blackness out from behind the backdrop of early Canadian texts and into the foreground of Canadian literary and cultural criticism as well as critical race studies; in turn, this theoretical model helps me to explain what cultural work “undefined and indefinable” blackness did in early Canada and in contemporary imaginings of it (Clarke <em>Odysseys</em>, 16). Working out this paradox in John Richardson’s <em>Wacousta </em>and <em>The Canadian Brothers</em>, Susanna Moodie’s <em>Roughing It in the Bush</em>, and Catharine Parr Traill’s <em>The Canadian Settlers Guide</em>, my three chapters examine how these Upper Canadian authors display as much as hide the crucial roles of blackness in the formation of Canada and Canadian national identity.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.