Dr Louis Ronse De Craene

Dr Louis Ronse De Craene, Research Associate

Dr Louis Ronse De Craene (Doctorate Leuven, Belgium 1992) is a botanist, and has worked at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh from 2002 to 2022 as Director of the MSc Course in the Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants. Since then he is attached as Research Associate at the garden and provides occasional teaching.

Main Research interests

My main research interests are centered on floral morphology, the evolution of flowers, and the use of floral characters in plant phylogeny. The last decades have seen great changes in our understanding of plant relationships based on molecular data. These changes represent an exciting opportunity to revisit morphology in a new framework of plant affinities and to link morphological studies with other research areas, such as evolutionary developmental genetics (evo-devo) and ecology. I am specialized in the study of floral development and anatomy, which are increasingly used as support for the molecular phylogeny in understanding the homology of characters for phylogenetic analyses and in the understanding of the underlying genetics of character expression. I am particularly interested in the study of floral morphology to clarify the homology of plant structures and the processes leading to floral form, including mechanical forces, pollinator preference, and epigenetic factors.

Through my earlier research I have acquired a broad expertise in floral morphology, which is becoming rare nowadays. My broad knowledge of flowering plants has enabled me to contribute actively to questions related to flowers and their evolution. Major questions I am currently interested in are the evolution of the flower in angiosperms, with special emphasis on the evolution of merism, the origin of the structural basis of core eudicot flowers (Pentapetalae) and monocots, the evolution of placentation, and the origin and evolution of petals in angiosperms, particularly Caryophyllales. Current research interests cover diverse groups, such as Caryophyllales, Ranunculales, the Primuloid clade of Ericales, Rosaceae, Sapindaceae, Malpighiales (Euphorbiaceae), Zingiberaceae, and Cyperaceae. Ongoing projects have been set up in collaboration with researchers from RBGE and other institutions and several students are contributing to this research on a regular basis. Collaborations are ongoing with partners from following countries: Japan, Chile, Brazil, France, Germany, Thailand, China, Russia and Portugal.

The understanding of the flower and its evolution remains one of the most important topics in botanical research. Floral organ position and numbers are generally highly conservative in evolution and are important indicators of systematic relationships. In this age of molecular taxonomy it is important to revisit flower morphology, as it contains a wealth of information that can be better understood in the new framework of relationships. My book “Floral Diagrams”, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010, with a second edition in 2022, aims to contribute to a better understanding of structural aspects of flowers and will hopefully coincide a renaissance in the study of flowers.  Together with Prof. Julien Bachelier I organise an annual summer workshop on flower morphology and angiosperm diversification at the Freie Universität Berlin (https://www.conftool.net/berlin-summer-course-2025/). I am also part of an active network for the promotion of floral studies (FLO-R-ES: https://floresorg.wordpress.com/ (Bull-Hereñu et al. 2016).

 

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