Spatial effects in ecoepidemic models

The direct and indirect effects that diseases have on interacting populations are the object of study of ecoepidemiology. The former are accounted for by counting the diseased individuals, the latter are represented by the changes induced in the other species due to epidemics-induced modifications in the diseased population. To model this, the populations of interest are partitioned into sound and infective individuals, and the possible transmission of the disease also to the other species may be taken into consideration, although in nature this is not always the case. If space is taken into account, populations are represented as densities depending on location, as well as on time. Their evolution is influenced also by the spatial movement. The epidemic spread takes then also a spatial connotation. We will try to describe a spatial ecoepidemic model in the framework of Clifford analysis, to see if this reformulation leads to some kind of simpler representation of the system evolution.