No abstract

Invasion of new territories by alien organisms is of primary concern for environmental and health agencies and has been a core topic in mathematical modeling, in particular in the intents of reconstructing the past dynamics of the alien organisms and predicting their future spatial extents. Partial differential equations offer a rich and flexible modeling framework that has been applied to a large number of invasions. In this article, we are specifically interested in dating and localizing the introduction that led to an invasion using mathematical modeling, post-introduction data and an adequate statistical inference procedure. We adopt a mechanistic-statistical approach grounded on a coupled reaction–diffusion–absorption model representing the dynamics of an organism in an heterogeneous domain with respect to growth. Initial conditions (including the date and site of the introduction) and model parameters related to diffusion, reproduction and mortality are jointly estimated in the Bayesian framework by using an adaptive importance sampling algorithm. This framework is applied to the invasion of Xylella fastidiosa , a phytopathogenic bacterium detected in South Corsica in 2015, France. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00285-019-01376-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We propose and develop a general approach based on reaction-diffusion equations for modelling a species dynamics in a realistic two-dimensional (2D) landscape crossed by linear one-dimensional (1D) corridors, such as roads, hedgerows or rivers. Our approach is based on a hybrid “2D/1D model”, i.e, a system of 2D and 1D reaction-diffusion equations with homogeneous coefficients, in which each equation describes the population dynamics in a given 2D or 1D element of the landscape. Using the example of the range expansion of the tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus in France and its main highways as 1D corridors, we show that the model can be fitted to realistic observation data. We develop a mechanistic-statistical approach, based on the coupling between a model of population dynamics and a probabilistic model of the observation process. This allows us to bridge the gap between the data (3 levels of infestation, at the scale of a French department) and the output of the model (population densities at each point of the landscape), and to estimate the model parameter values using a maximum-likelihood approach. Using classical model comparison criteria, we obtain a better fit and a better predictive power with the 2D/1D model than with a standard homogeneous reaction-diffusion model. This shows the potential importance of taking into account the effect of the corridors (highways in the present case) on species dynamics. With regard to the particular case of A. albopictus, the conclusion that highways played an important role in species range expansion in mainland France is consistent with recent findings from the literature.

The notion of inside dynamics of traveling waves has been introduced in the recent paper [14]. Assuming that a traveling wave u(t, x) = U (x − c t) is made of several components υ i ≥ 0 (i ∈ I ⊂ N), the inside dynamics of the wave is then given by the spatio-temporal evolution of the densities of the components υ i. For reaction-diffusion equations of the form ∂tu(t, x) = ∂xxu(t, x) + f (u(t, x)), where f is of monostable or bistable type, the results in [14] show that traveling waves can be classified into two main classes: pulled waves and pushed waves. Using the same framework, we study the pulled/pushed nature of the traveling wave solutions of delay equations ∂tu(t, x) = ∂xxu(t, x) + F (u(t − τ, x), u(t, x)). We begin with a review of the latest results on the existence of traveling wave solutions of such equations, for several classical reaction terms. Then, we give analytical and numerical results which describe the inside dynamics of these waves. From a point of view of population ecology, our study shows that the existence of a non-reproductive and motionless juvenile stage can slightly enhance the genetic diversity of a species colonizing an empty environment.

The numerical integration of switching circuits is known to be a tough issue when the number of switches is high, or when sliding modes exist. Then classical analog simulators may behave poorly, or even fail. In this paper it is shown on two examples that the nonsmooth dynamical systems (NSDS) approach, which is made of 1) a specific modelling of the piecewise-linear electronic devices (ideal diodes, Zener diodes, transistors), 2) the Moreau's time-stepping scheme, and 3) specific iterative one-step solvers, supersedes simulators of the SPICE family and hybrid simulators. An academic example constructed in [Maffezzoni et al, IEEE Trans. on CADICS, Vol 25, No 11, November 2006], so that the Newton-Raphson scheme does not converge, and the buck converter, are used to make extensive comparisons between the NSDS method and other methods of the SPICE family and a hybrid-like method. The NSDS method, implemented in the SICONOS platform developed at INRIA, proves to be on these two examples much faster and more robust with respect to the models parameters variations.