Predicting plant disease epidemics from functionally represented weather series

Epidemics are often triggered by specific weather patterns favouring the pathogen on susceptible hosts. For plant diseases, models predicting epidemics have therefore often emphasized the identification of early season weather patterns that are correlated with a disease outcome at some later point. Toward that end, window-pane analysis is an exhaustive search algorithm traditionally used in plant pathology for mining correlations in a weather series with respect to a disease endpoint. Here we show, with reference to Fusarium head blight (FHB) of wheat, that a functional approach is a more principled analytical method for understanding the relationship between disease epidemics and environmental conditions over an extended time series. We used scalar-on-function regression to model a binary outcome (FHB epidemic or non-epidemic) relative to weather time series spanning 140 days relative to flowering (when FHB infection primarily occurs). The functional models overall fit the data better than previously described standard logistic regression (lr) models. Periods much earlier than heretofore realized were associated with FHB epidemics. The findings were used to create novel weather summary variables which, when incorporated into lr models, yielded a new set of models that performed as well as existing lr models for real-time predictions of disease risk. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: approaches and important themes’. This issue is linked with the subsequent theme issue ‘Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: epidemic forecasting and control’.