Invasion of a Virulent Phytophthora infestans Genotype at the Landscape Level; Does Spatial Heterogeneity Matter?

Proper landscape-scale deployment of disease resistant genotypes of agricultural crop species could make those crops less vulnerable to invasion by resistance breaking genotypes. Here we develop a multi-scale, spatiotemporal model of the potato late blight pathosystem to investigate spatial strategies for the deployment of host resistance. This model comprises a landscape generator, a potato late blight model, and a suite of aerobiological models, including an atmospheric dispersion model. Within individual growing regions, increasing the number of host genotypes caused the greatest reduction in epidemic extent, followed by reduction of the proportion of potato in the landscape, lowering the clustering of host fields, and reducing the size of host fields. Deployment of host resistance in genotype mixtures had a large effect on disease invasion. The use of space as an isolation barrier was effective in scenarios involving two distinct potato growing regions. It was possible to completely eliminate the risk of epidemic spread from one region to another using inter-regional separation distances ranging from 8 to 32 km. The overall efficacy of this strategy was highly dependent, however, on the degree of spatial mixing of potato genotypes within each region. Deployment of host resistance in genotype mixtures in both regions served to reduce the overall level of incidence in the landscape and the inter-regional separation distance required to eliminate relevant levels of between-region spread of diseas