Paper detail

Concentration estimates in a multi-host epidemiological model structured by phenotypic traits

In this work we consider an epidemic system modelling the evolution of a spore-producing pathogen within a multi-host population of plants. Here we focus our analysis on the study of the stationary states. We first discuss the existence of such nontrivial states by using the theory of global attractors. Then we introduce a small parameter epsilon that characterises the width of the mutation kernel, and we describe the asymptotic shape of steady states with respect to epsilon. In particular, we show that the distribution of spores converges to the singular measure concentrated on the maxima of fitness of the pathogen in each plant population. This asymptotic description allows us to show the local stability of each of the positive steady states in the regime of narrow mutations, from which we deduce a uniqueness result for the nontrivial stationary states by means of a topological degree argument. These analyses rely on a careful investigation of the spectral properties of some non-local operators.