David Milne papers

From the Washington State Department of Enterprise Services website, as of 2014: "Dave Milne majored in physics as an undergraduate (Dartmouth, 1961). He completed all course work and field work required for the Masters Degree in Oceanography at the University of Washington (1961-64), then transferred to an institution focusing on computer modeling of population dynamics (Purdue University, 1964-67). After earning a PhD degree in Entomology there, he joined the faculty at Oregon State University (1967-71), where he worked with colleagues on ecosystem modeling and simulation as part of NSF’s International Biological Program.

Dr. Milne then (1971) accepted an offer to move to Evergreen State College where teaching, rather than research, was emphasized. Circumstances steered him back to marine studies, which he continued with students and faculty colleagues for the next 33 years. He and his students measured and analyzed water quality parameters at many locations in Budd and Eld Inlet at all times of year for that entire time. (These always included the common parameters – dissolved oxygen, salinity, temperature, nutrients – and sometimes, with a faculty chemist, heavy metals and some micronutrients.) Dr. Milne and his classes studied the movements and mixing of waters by tides, estuarine circulation, winds, temperature changes, and the Coriolis force and their relationship to the distribution of water quality parameters. In his (very limited) spare time he continued exploration of computer simulations, including tidal exchanges in small constricted inlets (eg., Port Gamble Bay) and population distribution of an estuarine crab (Cancer gracilis). Dr. Milne is the author of a marine biology textbook, Marine Life and the Sea (1995; Wadsworth Publishing Company). The manuscripts originating during this five-year writing and research exercise were reviewed and critiqued by some 25 marine biologists and oceanographers throughout the United States in four separate rounds of review, before final publication.

During the last 10 years before retirement, Dr. Milne focused his teaching, study, and engagement of classes on marine organisms introduced to Washington waters from other locales. His special focus was on the marine cordgrasses (Spartina spp.), Atlantic species introduced to Puget Sound, Willapa Bay, and other West Coast bays. He initiated a series of highly successful annual meetings of Spartina workers, became a major participant in the statewide effort to control those grasses, and conducted graduate level classes – The Ecology and Politics of Spartina – several of whose students were later hired by the Department of Agriculture to coordinate the entire statewide control effort. After retirement, Dr. Milne participated as “chief scientist” on spring-break cruises off the Washington Coast, in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, among the San Juan Islands, and in Central Puget Sound, for high school students. Biology, oceanography, water quality studies and marine ecology were emphasized in these 1-2 week expeditions. He currently maintains his interest in marine invasive species and all things marine."