Spatial and temporal dynamics of an almost periodic reaction-diffusion system for West Nile virus

TL;DR

This paper models West Nile virus spread using a reaction-diffusion system with spatial heterogeneity and seasonal variations, analyzing long-term behaviors and thresholds for disease propagation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel reaction-diffusion model incorporating almost periodic environments and free boundaries for West Nile virus, with rigorous analysis of solutions and spreading criteria.

Findings

Existence and uniqueness of global solutions established.

Long-term convergence to almost periodic functions when spreading occurs.

Initial infected domain and expansion rate critically influence disease persistence.

Abstract

In current paper, we put forward a reaction-diffusion system for West Nile virus in spatial heterogeneous and time almost periodic environment with free boundaries to investigate the influences of the habitat differences and seasonal variations on the propagation of West Nile virus. The existence, uniqueness and regularity estimates of the global solution for this disease model are given. Focused on the effects of spatial heterogeneity and time almost periodicity, we apply the principal Lyapunov exponent $\lambda(t)$ with time $t$ to get the initial infected domain threshold $L^*$ to analyze the long-time dynamical behaviors of the solution for this almost periodic West Nile virus model and give the spreading-vanishing dichotomy regimes of the disease. Especially, we prove that the solution for this West Nile virus model converges to a time almost periodic function locally uniformly for $x$ in $\mathbb R$ when the spreading occurs, which is driven by spatial differences and seasonal recurrence. Moreover, the initial disease infected domain and the front expanding rate have momentous impacts on the permanence and extinction of the epidemic disease. Eventually, numerical simulations identify our theoretical results.