Homogenization, sex, and differential motility predict spread of chronic wasting disease in mule deer in southern Utah (Q403995)

The article presents a very detailed PDE modeling of chronic wasting disease (CWD, a kind of infectious prion disease) in mule deer habiting southwestern Utah. The basic model is a sex-structured SIR model supplied with a differential equation, which takes into account environmental hazard and the ecological diffusion. The last one is defined as \(\nabla^2[\mu(\mathbf{x})u]\), where \(u\) is substituted by the densities of susceptible and infected subpopulations and \(\mu(\mathbf{x})\) is the motility coefficients reflecting landscape patchiness, etc. Different scales of mobility are considered via the multi-scale homogenization procedure. Additionally to the analytical study of stability and asymptotic speed of spread, the very circumstantial numerical simulations based on the real ecological, geographical and populational data are evaluated. The authors provide a complete set of determined parameters that can be extremely useful for future studies of problems of population dynamics in the considered geographical region. From the point of view of mathematical biology, the successful results of the simulations clearly confirm the advantages of the use of an ecological diffusion term over the Fickian one.