VIEW ARTICLE

Letter to the Editor

Threshold Criteria for Model Plant Disease Epidemics. I. Asymptotic Results. M. J. Jeger and F. van den Bosch. First author: Natural Resources Institute, Central Avenue, Chatham Maritime, Chatham, ME44TB, UK; and second author: Department of Phytopathology, Agricultural University of Wageningen, P.O. Box 8025, 6700EE Wageningen, the Netherlands. Phytopathology 84:24-27. Accepted for publication 15 September 1993. Crown copyright 1994. doi:10.1094/Phyto-84-24.

There is much interest in and debate on the "threshold criteria" that determine whether a plant disease epidemic takes place. These criteria are derived from simplified mathematical models of an epidemic, rather than from actual observations. The justification for using simplified models is that a sufficient portion of an epidemic's characteristics are encapsulated to be relevant to real-life situations.