People

Dr Richard Milne

Location: Rutherford G02

Telephone:

Website: No details available

Group members: No details available

C.V.

Year	Description
2008	Appointed as Lecturer, jointly employed by University of Edinburgh and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
2004	Joined University of Edinburgh; NERC Research Fellow
2001-2004	Postdoctoral Fellow on series of four small grants written with Dr Richard Abbott, University of St Andrews
1998-2000	Postdoctoral Fellow, University of St Andrews
1993-1997	PhD, University of St Andrews
1991-1992	Conducted biodiversity survey in Colombian rainforest
1988-1991	BSc in Plant Science, University of Bristol
1987-1988	Assistant Scientific Officer, Herbarium of Kew Gardens

Research groupings

No details available

Teaching

Currently I lecture on the following courses:

	Year	No. of lectures
Origin and Diversity of Life	1	6
Environmental and Community Biology	1	4
Plants, Fungi and Symbiosis	2	3
Evolution and Ecology of Plants	3	6
Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants	MSc	4

I am also Course Organiser for ODL1 (Origin and Diversity of Life, 1st year course).

My teaching areas cover much of whole plant biology, including plants evolution past and present, plant diversity, plant interactions with their environments, biogeography, hybridisation, classical taxonomy and modern molecular systematics.

I am also heavily involved in the Plant Science field course which runs every year. Recent destinations include Tenerife, The Burren (W. Ireland) and Cilento National Park (Italy).

In 2009 I won the EUSA award for "innovative teaching", which was voted for by students across the University of Edinburgh.

4th year students

4th year Plant Science students examining a naturalised plant of an unusual Rhododendron hybrid, near Callander, Scotland.

Research interests

My reseach interests focus upon various areas of plant evolution, often but not always using Rhododendron as a study organism. I have published a series of papers on hybridisation in Rhododendron, which introduced to the scientific literature the novel concept of an 'F1-dominated hybrid zone', in which large numbers of fertile F1 hybrids appear to exclude other genotypes from a specific habitat via superior fitness alone. My recent work on this area has involved collaborations with Chinese researchers, while my PhD student Tobias Marczewski is conducting a detailed examination of hybrids and problematic Rhododendron taxa in Yunnan, China.

A second major area of interest is in biogeography, both at global and more local levels. My students Kathryn Armstrong and Bhaskar Adhikari are each conducting biogeographic studies that focus on particular areas (respectively SE Asia and Nepal) within the distributions of very widespread genera. I am intersted in the timing, route and method of plant movement between landmasses, and have written two review articles on these topics. I am also researching the systematics of Rhododendron subgenus Hymenanthes, a group found disjunctly throughout the northern Hemisphere, and which has undergone rapid radiation in the area around SW China.


Flowers of the F1 hybrid Rhododendron x sochadzeae (R. ponticum x R. caucasicum) bagged for hand pollination experiments to determine the fertility of the flowers	Rhododendron ponticum and the mountains in NE Turkey where natural populations of this species hybridise with three close relatives: R. caucasicum, R. ungernii and R. smirnowii.

Representative publications

2009:

Zha H-G, Milne RI, Sun H: Asymmetric hybridisation in Rhododendron agastum: a hybrid taxon comprising mainly F1s in Yunnan, China. Annals of Botany, provisionally accepted 22nd May, 2009

Milne RI (2009). Can upper limits be placed on divergence times in genera with few species and poor fossil records? Journal of Systematics and Evolution, in press.

2008:

Chen K, Abbott RJ, Milne RI, Tian X-M, Liu J (2008). Phylogeography of Pinus tabulaeformis Carr. (Pinaceae), a dominant species of coniferous forest in northern China. Molecular Ecology 17: 4276-4288.

Zha H-G, Milne RI, Sun H (2008). Morphological and molecular evidence of natural hybridization between two distantly related Rhododendron species from the Sino-Himalaya. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 156:119-129.

Milne RI, Abbott RJ (2008). Reproductive isolation among two interfertile Rhododendron species: low frequency of post-F1 hybrid genotypes in alpine hybrid zones. Molecular Ecology, 17: 1108-1121.

Up to 2007:

Milne RI (2006). Northern hemisphere plant disjunctions: a window on Tertiary land bridges and climate change? Annals of Botany 98: 465-472.

Milne, R.I. & Abbott, R.J. (2002). The origin and evolution of Tertiary relict floras. Advances in Botanical Research, 38: 281-314.

Milne, R.I., Terzioglu, S. & Abbott, R.J. (2003). A hybrid zone dominated by fertile F1s: maintenance of species barriers in Rhododendron. Molecular Ecology, 12: 2719-2729.

Milne, R.I. (2004) Phylogeny and biogeography of Rhododendron subsection Pontica, a group with a Tertiary relict distribution. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 33: 389-401.

Abbott, R. J., Smith, L. C., Milne, R.I. , Crawford, R. M. M., Wolff, K. W. & Balfour, J. (2000). Molecular analysis of plant migration and refugia in the arctic. Science, 289: 1343-1346.

This article was published on Feb 8, 2012