How Spatial Heterogeneity Affects Transient Behavior in Reaction-Diffusion Systems for Ecological Interactions?

R 0 May Not Tell Us Everything: Transient Disease Dynamics of Some SIR Models Over Patchy Environments

This paper examines the short-term or transient dynamics of SIR infectious disease models in patch environments. We employ reactivity of an equilibrium and amplification rates, concepts from ecology, to analyze how dispersals/travels between patches, spatial heterogeneity, and other disease-related parameters impact short-term dynamics. Our findings reveal that in certain scenarios, due to the impact of spatial heterogeneity and the dispersals, the short-term disease dynamics over a patch environment may disagree with the long-term disease dynamics that is typically reflected by the basic reproduction number. Such an inconsistence can mislead the public, public healthy agencies and governments when making public health policy and decisions, and hence, these findings are of practical importance.

Reactivity of communities at equilibrium and periodic orbits

Reactivity measures the transient response of a system following a perturbation from a stable state. For steady states, the theory of reactivity is well developed and frequently applied. However, we find that reactivity depends critically on the scaling used in the equations. We therefore caution that calculations of reactivity from nondimensionalized models may be misleading. The attempt to extend reactivity theory to stable periodic orbits is very recent. We study reactivity of periodically forced and intrinsically generated periodic orbits. For periodically forced systems, we contribute a number of observations and examples that had previously received less attention. In particular, we systematically explore how reactivity depends on the timing of the perturbation. We then suggest ways to extend the theory to intrinsically generated periodic orbits. We investigate several possible global measures of reactivity of a periodic orbit and show that there likely is no single quantity to consistently measure the transient response of a system near a periodic orbit.