Predicting the dispersal of transgenic pollen for bee-pollinated crops
The containment of 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. In this talk, I develop models for honey bee and pollen movement using the classic brownian motion assumption, or the diffusion approach, and use the models to understand GM pollen dispersal. I then extend this work to include Lévy flight behaviour (a fractional diffusion approach) in a model that can be tuned to model motion ranging from pure Brownian to pure Lévy. Both models are validated using field study data, and the ways in which the two models approximate the data are discussed. Estimated isolation distances are also computed and compared.