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Abstract
In the face of a changing climate, food crops are increasingly threatened by arthropod-vectored viruses. The development of accessible predictive tools for these pathosystems has been overlooked. I developed a generalizable spatially-explicit simulation model for arthropod-vectored plant diseases that was parameterized for two plant virus pathosystems, Blueberry Necrotic Ring Blotch Virus (BNRBV) of Southern Highbush Blueberry and a Whitefly Transmitted Virus Complex (WTVC) of yellow squash, to replicate disease incidence field data for these systems. For the BNRBV pathosystem, the model performed well at replicating severity, location, and patchiness of disease. For the WTVC pathosystem, the model performed well at representing patchiness of disease but tended to overestimate whole-field disease incidence and misrepresent disease distribution in the field. Model results suggest that a general understanding of pathosystem dynamics coupled with demographic and behavioral data from vector literature can be sufficient to reasonably represent plant virus disease spread.