A Lévy-flight diffusion model to predict transgenic pollen dispersal
(2017) Journal of the Royal Society Interface — Vol. 14, n° 126, p. 20160889 (2017)
Files
VallaeysEtAl_JRSI_Accepted.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 340.07 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- The containment of genetically modified (GM) pollen is an issue of significant concern for many countries. For crops that are bee-pollinated, model predictions of outcrossing rates depend on the movement hypothesis used for the pollinators. Previous work studying pollen spread by honeybees, the most important pollinator worldwide, was based on the assumption that honeybee movement can be well approximated by Brownian motion. A number of recent studies, however, suggest that pollinating insects such as bees perform Le´vy flights in their search for food. Such flight patterns yield much larger rates of spread, and so the Brownian motion assumption might significantly underestimate the risk associated with GM pollen outcrossing in conventional crops. In this work, we propose a mechanistic model for pollen dispersal in which the bees performtruncated Le´vy flights. This assumption leads to a fractional- order diffusion model for pollen that can be tuned to model motion ranging from pure Brownian to pure Le´vy. We parametrize our new model by taking the samepollen dispersal dataset used in Brownianmotionmodelling studies. By numerically solving themodel equations,we showthat the isolation distances required to keep outcrossing levels belowa certain threshold are substantially increased by comparison with the original predictions, suggesting that isolation distances may need to be much larger than originally thought.
- Affiliations
Citations
Vallaeys, V., Tyson, R. C., Lane, W. D., Deleersnijder, E., & Hanert, E. (2017). A Lévy-flight diffusion model to predict transgenic pollen dispersal. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 14(126), 20160889. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2016.0889 (Original work published 2017)