Biological invasions and epidemics with nonlocal diffusion along a line

TL;DR

This study models how a nonlocal diffusion line influences the speed of biological invasions and epidemics in a plane, revealing conditions that significantly boost propagation speed and uncovering unexpected regularity properties.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous analysis of a reaction-diffusion system with nonlocal line diffusion, characterizing when and how the line enhances propagation speed.

Findings

Propagation speed is significantly increased when diffusion kernel intensity or support size is large.

The model exhibits unexpected regularity properties.

Transport on the line can also influence propagation in notable ways.

Abstract

The goal of this work is to understand and quantify how a line with nonlocal diffusion given by an integral enhances a reaction-diffusion process occurring in the surrounding plane. This is part of a long term programme where we aim at modelling, in a mathematically rigorous way, the effect of transportation networks on the speed of biological invasions or propagation of epidemics. We prove the existence of a global propagation speed and characterise in terms of the parameters of the system the situations where such a speed is boosted by the presence of the line. In the course of the study we also uncover unexpected regularity properties of the model. On the quantitative side, the two main parameters are the intensity of the diffusion kernel and the characteristic size of its support. One outcome of this work is that the propagation speed will significantly be enhanced even if only one of the two is large, thus broadening the picture that we have already drawn in our previous works on the subject, with local diffusion modelled by a standard Laplacian. We further investigate the role of the other parameters, enlightening some subtle effects due to the interplay between the diffusion in the half plane and that on the line. Lastly, in the context of propagation of epidemics, we also discuss the model where, instead of a diffusion, displacement on the line comes from a pure transport term.