alice milne

Science

Dr Alice Milne

Agricultural Systems Modeller - Spatial Statistician

Net Zero and Resilient Farming

PUBLICATIONS
Location
Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, AL5 2JQ
Tel
+44 (0) 1582 938 380
Email
alice.milne@rothamsted.ac.uk
Professional Platforms
ORCID

Biography

Dr Alice Milne (AEM) is a mathematician in the Sustainable Agriculture Sciences Department and leads the Epidemiological Modelling Group within the Biointeractions and Crop Protection Department.  Alice has expertise in applying mathematics to biological and agricultural systems. She works on models of crop diseases, weed patch dynamics, and soil nutrients. An increasing and important facet is the inclusion of humans in systems, particularly how cooperation can lead to multiple outcomes. Using a game-theoretic approach, Alice worked on modelling farmer decisions related to the control of O. nubilalis populations in the US and more recently has explored using opinion dynamics to model grower behaviour in response to HLB disease in citrus. Alice is also currently working on the Rothamsted Landscape Model, which is a spatially explicit model of agricultural processes, that is being used to explore production and environmental trade-offs in the landscape. Other areas of expertise include the analysis of spatial data using methods such as wavelets, geostatistics and uncertainty analysis.

Strategic Programme

  • Achieving Sustainable Agricultural Systems (ASSIST)
  • Soil 2 Nutrition (S2N)

Science Projects

  • Management of Rotations, Soil Structure and Water
  • Delivering the agricultural greenhouse gas and ammonia inventories and projections

PhD Projects

  • Modelling the causes of spatial and temporal variation in annual grass weeds in fields for precision weed management
  • Soil health metrics for sustainable farming systems
  • Statistical analysis of extremes in the measured and simulated fine-resolution temporal data sets from the North Wyke Farm Platform

Awards

  • 1995 - PhD Applied Mathematics, University of Exeter, UK
  • 1991 - BSc Mathematics (1st Class), University of Exeter, UK

Measures of Esteem

  • Member of the British Society of Soil Science and the European Geosciences Union
  • Joint convenor of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) group for "Communication of uncertain information in earth sciences: data, models and visualization"
  • Secretary of the Statistics and Informatics Subdivision, European Geosciences Union Soil System Sciences division