Mechanistic atmospheric transport simulations in crop epidemiology

Several of the most devastating crop diseases and insect pests can be transported by winds over extremely long distances; they cross regions, countries and even entire continents. These low-probability but high-impact events can have severe consequences for agricultural production by causing epidemic outbreaks or insect pest infestations in previously uninfected areas. Whilst recent advances, e.g. in meteorological modelling, international surveillance efforts, and computational techniques allow for obtaining first quantitative estimates of wind-borne transmission risks, various open questions, challenges and uncertainties remain to be addressed for improving our understanding and capacity to predict risks for agricultural production posed by wind-borne transmission of crop diseases and insect pests. Key open questions evolve around complex interactions between meteorological drivers (e.g., wind, temperature) and biology of pathogens and insect pests (e.g., survival times, flight direction), characteristic spatial and temporal scales, and around the integration of realistic atmospheric dispersal components into epidemiological models. This project addresses two key objectives: (i) parameterize existing operational atmospheric transport models for a set of key wind-borne crop diseases and insect pests; (ii) develop a novel GPU-based simulation tool for studying windborne disease transmission, including the integration of realistic dispersal models into epidemiological models for disease dynamics.