Global stability analysis of an age-structured model assessing the impact of Radopholus similis on banana-plantain production

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical model to analyze the impact of Radopholus similis on banana-plantain production, demonstrating stability conditions and the effectiveness of control strategies through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel age-structured model incorporating root infection dynamics and provides a stability analysis with numerical validation for pest management.

Findings

Threshold parameter  determines disease stability.

Nematicide control strategies effectively reduce pest impact.

Numerical simulations align with biological expectations.

Abstract

In this paper, we develop and analyse a mathematical model to investigate the interactions between banana and plantain plants and the nematode \textit{Radopholus similis}, a pest species occurring in banana plantations worldwide, with particularly high prevalence in Central Africa. The model incorporates root infection and mortality rates as functions of root age, providing a more realistic representation of the infection dynamics. We prove that the model is well-defined by establishing the existence and uniqueness of a mild solution using the theory of semi-groups for nonlinear evolutionary systems. We further show that the solution is positive and bounded. Under additional assumptions on the regularity of the parameters and the data, we prove that the mild solution is indeed a classical solution. We then study the asymptotic behaviour of the solution by deriving a threshold parameter \(\mathcal{N}\), which determines the stability of the disease-free equilibrium. Finally, we perform a numerical analysis of the proposed model using the semi-implicit Euler method. The biological consistency of the numerical solutions is established, and simulations are carried out to illustrate the theoretical results and estimate yield losses caused by nematodes. We conclude the numerical analysis by implementing an impulsive control strategy, which confirms that the use of nematicides - whether chemical or biological - helps to mitigate the devastating effects of nematodes and enhances crop yield.