Steady state concentration for a phenotypic structured problem modeling the evolutionary epidemiology of spore producing pathogens

Abstract

In this paper, we construct a model to describe the evolutionary epidemiology of spore producing asexual plant pathogens in a homogeneous host population. By considering the evolution in the space of the pathogen phenotypic values, we derive an integro-differential equation with nonlocal mutation terms. Our first main result is concerned with the existence and uniqueness of the endemic steady state of the model. Next assuming that the mutation kernel depends on a small parameter [Formula: see text] (the variance of the dispersion into the space of the pathogen phenotypic values), we investigate the concentration properties of the endemic steady state in the space of phenotypic values. In the context of this work, several Evolutionary Attractors (EAs) (as defined in classical adaptive dynamics) may exist. However, in rather general situations, our results show that only one EA persists when the populations are at equilibrium and when [Formula: see text] is small enough. Our analysis strongly relies on a refined description of the spectral properties of some integral operator with a highly concentrated kernel. We conclude the paper by presenting some numerical simulations of the model to illustrate this concentration phenomenon.