Modeling the spread of a pathogen over a spatially heterogeneous growing crop

Abstract

The spread of a pathogen within an anthropized crop plot depends on many factors acting at contrasted spatio-temporal scales. This is of paramount importance for vine and powdery mildew, one of its airborne pathogen. We aimed at developing a coupled PDEs-ODEs model for plant-pathogen interactions at the plot scale level in order to assess the effects of various host heterogeneities on the epidemic spread.