Speaker
Hermann Eberl
(University of Guelph)
Description
Fireblight is a bacterial disease of apple and pear trees that can wipe out an entire orchard in a single growing season. We formulate a mathematical model for the spread of this disease during bloom. The resulting model consists of a system of two semilinear PDEs for the pathogen, coupled to three ODEs describing the infection dynamics. Numerical simulations suggest the existence of travelling waves that we then set out to prove. We will discuss how the travelling waves analysis gives insight into disease propagation that can be useful for disease control, management and prevention. Our analytical results, are suboptimal in the sense that the necessary conditions for TW that we find are not also necessary.
Author
Hermann Eberl
(University of Guelph)
