Pathogen-Driven Outbreaks in Forest Defoliators Revisited: Building Models from Experimental Data.

Models of outbreaks in forest-defoliating insects are typically built from a priori considerations and tested only with long time series of abundances. We instead present a model built from experimental data on the gypsy moth and its nuclear polyhedrosis virus, which has been extensively tested with epidemic data. These data have identified key details of the gypsy moth-virus interaction that are missing from earlier models, including …