The spread of a wild plant pathogen is driven by the road network

Elina Numminen and Anna-Liisa Laine

PLOS Computational Biology, 2020, vol. 16, issue 3, 1-21

Abstract: Spatial analyses of pathogen occurrence in their natural surroundings entail unique opportunities for assessing in vivo drivers of disease epidemiology. Such studies are however confronted by the complexity of the landscape driving epidemic spread and disease persistence. Since relevant information on how the landscape influences epidemiological dynamics is rarely available, simple spatial models of spread are often used. In the current study we demonstrate both how more complex transmission pathways could be incorpoted to epidemiological analyses and how this can offer novel insights into understanding disease spread across the landscape. Our study is focused on Podosphaera plantaginis, a powdery mildew pathogen that transmits from one host plant to another by wind-dispersed spores. Its host populations often reside next to roads and thus we hypothesize that the road network influences the epidemiology of P. plantaginis. To analyse the impact of roads on the transmission dynamics, we consider a spatial dataset on the presence-absence records on the pathogen collected from a fragmented landscape of host populations. Using both mechanistic transmission modeling and statistical modeling with road-network summary statistics as predictors, we conclude the evident role of the road network in the progression of the epidemics: a phenomena which is manifested both in the enhanced transmission along the roads and in infections typically occurring at the central hub locations of the road network. We also demonstrate how the road network affects the spread of the pathogen using simulations. Jointly our results highlight how human alteration of natural landscapes may increase disease spread.Author summary: Studying pathogen transmission dynamics within their natural environments can yield important new insights both on the known and unknown determinants of the real-world transmission process. In this study we analyse how a fungal plant pathogen occurs within a landscape, showing that the road network dictates where the pathogen occurs, not only by providing suitable habitat for the host plant, but also by enhancing transmissions along the roads. Mechanistic understanding of how and where the transmission is expected to occur can yield novel insights into the ecology of pathogens, and is essential for design of control strategies.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007703 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/fil ... 07703&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pcbi00:1007703

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007703

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Computational Biology from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ploscompbiol ().