Agro-ecological control of a pest-host system: preventing spreading

TL;DR

This paper models an integrated agro-ecological system combining pest control and disease spread, analyzing its long-term dynamics and exploring control strategies through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a complex coupled PDE model with spatial heterogeneity for pest and disease management, analyzing stability and control impacts.

Findings

Long-term behavior depends on a linear stability criterion.

System exhibits nonlinear subtleties affecting stability.

Numerical simulations show initial conditions strongly influence outcomes.

Abstract

We consider an agro-ecologically motivated coupling between a prey-predator system and a vector-borne epidemic system. The coupled system contains one ODE, two reaction-diffusion PDEs and one reaction-diffusionadvection PDE; it has no complete variational or monotonic structure and coefficients are spatially heterogeneous. We study the long-time behavior of solutions of the Cauchy-Neumann problem, which turns out to be largely decided by a linear stability criterion but still involves nonlinear subtleties. Then we consider an optimal control problem. Although it remains elusive analytically, we show numerically the variety of outcomes and the strong impact of the initial conditions.