Long‐Distance Dispersal and Accelerating Waves of Disease: Empirical Relationships

Classic approaches to modeling biological invasions predict a “traveling wave” of constant velocity determined by the invading organism’s reproductive capacity, generation time, and dispersal ability. Traveling wave models may not apply, however, for organisms that exhibit long‐distance dispersal. Here we use simple empirical relationships for accelerating waves, based on inverse power law dispersal, and apply them to diseases caused by pathogens that are wind dispersed or vectored by birds: the within‐season spread of a plant disease at spatial scales of