This research article published by the Journal of Mathematics and Informatics, Vol. 15, 31 January 2019
Northern Corn Leaf Blight (NCLB) disease is a fungal foliar disease caused by
Exserohilum turcicum. Moderate temperature and high relative humidity are climatical
conditions which favor the development of NCLB disease. A deterministic model for
transmission dynamics of NCLB disease with seasonal weather variations is developed
and vigorously analyzed. The basic reproduction number in the absence and presence
of the impact of temperature and relative humidity is computed and the sensitivity
analysis performed to determine the parameters’ relationship with basic reproduction
number
. The analysis shows that transmission rate from pathogen to susceptible maize
plants, the pathogen’s shedding rate from infected maize plants to the environment and
maize plants disease induced death rate are more sensitive to NCLB disease dynamics
and they play an important role in its transmission. On the other hands when there are
high or low temperature and low humidity, sensitive negative parameters increases as the
results NCLB disease development decreases. However, increasing parameters such as
natural death rate of the pathogen, the natural death rate for maize plants and maize
plants’ disease induced death rate which have negative indices will reduce new
infections. Moderate temperature and high relative humidity influence NCLB disease
development.