Steven M. White

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology | CEH · UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology Wallingford

The incidence of vector-borne disease is on the rise globally, with burdens increasing in endemic countries and outbreaks occurring in new locations. Effective mitigation and intervention strategies require models that accurately predict both spatial and temporal changes in disease dynamics, but this remains challenging due to the complex and inter...

Purpose The rising burden of mosquito-borne diseases in Europe extends beyond urban areas, encompassing rural and semi-urban regions near managed and natural wetlands evidenced by recent outbreaks of Usutu and West Nile viruses. While wetland management policies focus on biodiversity and ecosystem services, few studies explore the impact on mosquit...

Xylella fastidiosa is an insect-vectored bacterial plant pathogen with a wide host range, causing significant economic impact in the agricultural and horticultural industries. Once restricted to Americas, severe European outbreaks have been discovered, causing economic and social harm. It is a great concern for Xylella-free countries, such as Great...

The bacterial plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa causes disease in several globally important crops. However, some cultivars harbour reduced bacterial loads and express few symptoms. Evidence considering plant species in isolation suggests xylem structure influences cultivar susceptibility to X . fastidiosa . We test this theory more broadly by anal...

Xylella fastidiosa (X. fastidiosa) is a bacterium that colonises internal plant vascular networks causing pathogenic effects on several commercially important crops (e.g. olives, grapes, coffee, etc.). Despite a growing research effort since the recent detection of X. fastidiosa in Europe, the exact processes leading to X. fastidiosa disease sympto...

Xylella fastidiosa is a xylem‐limited plant pathogen infecting many crops globally and is the cause of the recent olive disease epidemic in Italy. One strategy proposed to mitigate losses is to re‐plant susceptible crops with resistant varieties. Several genetic, biochemical and biophysical traits are associated to X. fastidiosa disease resistance....

Predicting complex species-environment interactions is crucial for guiding conservation and mitigation strategies in a dynamically changing world. Phenotypic plasticity is a mechanism of trait variation that determines how individuals and populations adapt to changing and novel environments. For individuals, the effects of phenotypic plasticity can...

Vector-borne diseases (VBDs), such as dengue, Zika, West Nile virus (WNV) and tick-borne encephalitis, account for substantial human morbidity worldwide and have expanded their range into temperate regions in recent decades. Climate change has been proposed as a likely driver of past and future expansion, however, the complex ecology of host and ve...

Xylella fastidiosa (X. fastidiosa) is a bacterium that colonises internal plant vascular networks causing pathogenic effects on several commercially important crops (e.g. olives, grapes, coffee, etc.). Despite a growing research effort since the recent detection of X. fastidiosa in Europe, the exact processes leading to X. fastidiosa disease sympto...

In order to prevent and control the emergence of biosecurity threats such as vector-borne diseases of plants, it is vital to understand drivers of entry, establishment, and spatiotemporal spread, as well as the form, timing, and effectiveness of disease management strategies. An inherent challenge for policy in combatting emerging disease is the un...

Xylella fastidiosa is an important insect‐vectored bacterial plant pathogen with a wide host range, causing significant economic impact in the agricultural and horticultural industries. Once restricted to the Americas, severe European outbreaks have been discovered recently in Italy, Spain, France and Portugal. The Italian outbreak was detected in...

EFSA was asked to update the 2015 EFSA risk assessment on Xylella fastidiosa for the territory of the EU. In particular, EFSA was asked to focus on potential establishment, short- and long-range spread, the length of the asymptomatic period, the impact of X. fastidiosa and an update on risk reduction options. EFSA was asked to take into account the...

Background: Many mosquito-borne diseases exhibit substantial seasonality, due to strong links between environmental variables and vector and pathogen life-cycles. Further, a range of density-dependent and density-independent biotic and abiotic processes affect the phenology of mosquito populations, with potentially large knock-on effects for vector...

To address the lack of information about the shape and extent of real dispersal kernels, Bullock et al. ( Journal of Ecology 105:6‐19, 2017) synthesised empirical information on seed dispersal distances. Testing the fit of a variety of probability density functions, they found no function was the best‐fitting for all datasets but some outperformed...

Xylella fastidiosa is an important plant pathogen that attacks several plants of economic importance. Once restricted to the Americas, the bacterium, which causes olive quick decline syndrome, was discovered near Lecce, Italy in 2013. Since the initial outbreak, it has invaded 23,000 ha of olives in the Apulian Region, southern Italy, and is of gre...

In their recent paper, Staver and Hansen (Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2015, 24, 985–987) refute the case made by Hanan et al. (Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2014, 23, 259–263) that the use of classification and regression trees (CARTs) to predict tree cover from remotely sensed imagery (MODIS VCF) inherently introduces biases, thus making t...

Background Understanding seasonal patterns of abundance of insect vectors is important for optimisation of control strategies of vector-borne diseases. Environmental drivers such as temperature, humidity and photoperiod influence vector abundance, but it is not generally known how these drivers combine to affect seasonal population dynamics. Method...

Understanding the ability of plants to spread is important for assessing conservation strategies, landscape dynamics, invasiveness and ability to cope with climate change. While long‐distance seed dispersal is often viewed as a key process in population spread, the importance of inter‐specific variation in demography is less explored. Indeed, the r...

1) Dispersal is fundamental to ecological processes at all scales and levels of organization, but progress is limited by a lack of information about the general shape and form of plant dispersal kernels. We addressed this gap by synthesizing empirical data describing seed dispersal and fitting general dispersal kernels representing major plant type...

Landscape ecological modelling provides a vital means for understanding the interactions between geographical, climatic, and socio-economic drivers of land-use and the dynamics of ecological systems. This growing field is playing an increasing role in informing landscape spatial planning and management. Here, we review the key modelling approaches...

Simulating spatially explicit population models to predict population spread allows environmental managers to make better‐informed decisions. Accurate simulation requires high spatial resolution, which, using existing techniques, can require prohibitively large amounts of computational resources (RAM, CPU, etc). We developed and implemented a novel...

Estimating population spread rates across multiple species is vital for projecting biodiversity responses to climate change. A major challenge is to parameterise spread models for many species. We introduce an approach that addresses this challenge, coupling a trait-based analysis with spatial population modelling to project spread rates for 15 000...

Mosquito-borne diseases cause substantial mortality and morbidity worldwide. These impacts are widely predicted to increase as temperatures warm and extreme precipitation events become more frequent, since mosquito biology and disease ecology are strongly linked to environmental conditions. However, direct evidence linking environmental change to c...

2015. Inventory and review of quantitative models for spread of plant pests for use in pest risk assessment for the EU territory. EFSA supporting publication 2015:EN-795, 190 pp. Available online: www.efsa.europa.eu/publications ABSTRACT This report considers the prospects for increasing the use of quantitative models for plant pest spread and disp...

Ensuring a sustainable yield is essential for continued survival of a natural resource, however over-exploitation can easily occur. Therefore, understanding how increasing the harvesting rate affects the yield is vital. Harvesting of infected hosts in a host–pathogen system, for example the fungal pathogen Cordyceps sinensis which is harvested for...

Characterising the spread of biological populations is crucial in responding to both biological invasions and to the shifting of habitat under climate change. Spreading speeds can be studied through mathematical models such as the discrete-time integro-difference equation (IDE) framework. The usual approach in implementing IDE models has been to ig...

The rate of spread is an important measure of species adaptability, and has implications in biogeography, epidemiology and conservation biology. Particularly relevant in conservation is the ability of species to compensate the predicted future habitat loss due to climate change by spreading in new climatically suitable areas. However, given the lac...

Understanding how species' traits relate to their status (e.g. invasiveness or rarity) is important because it can help to efficiently focus conservation and management effort and infer mechanisms affecting plant status. This is particularly important for invasiveness, in which proactive action is needed to restrict the establishment of potentially...

Landscape fragmentation has huge ecological and economic implications and affects the spatial dynamics of many plant species. Determining the speed of population spread in fragmented/heterogeneous landscapes is therefore of utmost importance to ecologists. Stage-structured Integrodifference Equations (IDEs) are deterministic models which accurately...

Biological invasions have dramatically altered the natural world by threatening native species and their communities. Moreover, when the invading species is a vector for human disease, there are further substantive public health and economic impacts. The development of transgenic technologies is being explored in relation to new approaches for the...

The invasion of pest insects often changes or destroys a native ecosystem, and can result in food shortages and disease endemics. Issues such as the environmental effects of chemical control methods, the economic burden of maintaining control strategies and the risk of pest resistance still remain, and mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and de...

Insects are infected by a variety of pathogens, including bacteria, fungi and viruses, which have been studied largely for their potential as biocontrol agents, but are also important in insect conservation (biodiversity) and as model systems for other diseases. Whilst the dynamics of host-pathogen interactions are well-studied at the population le...

1. Climate change impacts on habitat suitability and demography are often studied, but direct effects on plant dispersal are rarely considered. To address this we analysed climate model projections of future wind speeds and modelled their possible impacts on dispersal and spread of wind-dispersed plants. 2. Projections for 17 Global Climate Models...

Background/Question/Methods Spatial heterogeneity indirectly influences the coevolution of relevant traits of interacting species by affecting geographic patterns in species interactions. Species survival and reproduction differ predictably over space, thus environmental gradients in landscapes are likely to be important in coevolutionary dynamic...

1. The development of transgenic technologies, coupled with sterile insect techniques (SIT), is being explored in relation to new approaches for the biological control of insect pests. Recent studies have shown that there are often fitness costs associated with transgenic insect strains, but the impact of these costs on their potential use in pest...

Background/Question/Methods Pathogens play an important role for many host organisms, ranging from population regulation to species invasion, which in turn, have applications for issues such as disease control, pest control and biodiversity. However, much of our empirical understanding of host-pathogen ecology and evolution is derived from scenari...

This paper deals with the solution of systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and systems of delay differential equations (DDEs) in which solution impulses are applied at specific times. Such systems include a wide range of biologically motivated examples. Event functions are used to locate the times at which impulses are applied. Systems...

Parasitism can influence many aspects of the host's behaviour and physiology, which in turn can have a profound impact on their population and evolutionary ecology. In many host–parasite interactions there is often a time lag between infection and the death of the host, yet little is known, experimentally or theoretically, about the effects that in...

Insect pest species can have devastating effects on crops. Control of these insect pests is usually achieved by using chemical insecticides. However, there has been much cause for concern with their overuse. Consequently, research has been carried out into alternative forms of control, in particular biological control methods. Recent laboratory stu...

Recently there has been a great deal of interest within the ecological community about the interactions of local populations that are coupled only by dispersal. Models have been developed to consider such scenarios but the theory needed to validate model outcomes has been somewhat lacking. In this paper, we present theory which can be used to under...