Improving prophylaxis for pollen allergies: Predicting the time course of the pollen load of the atmosphere of major allergenic plants in France and Spain

Since the beginning of aeropalynology, aerobiologists have tried to develop models able to predict the pollen load of the atmosphere to help physicians and patients suffering pollen allergies to improve the efficiency of pollen allergies prophylaxis. Some models have been developed by aerobiological services and are used for real time predictions, now provided online. They are statistical models and require the pollen load of the previous days as input, as well as statistics on the pollen load of the previous years, daily meteorological data and geographic information on the pollen sources. Here we propose to use process-based phenological models to predict the time course of the pollen load of the atmosphere using solely daily mean temperatures as input. The model proposed has been fitted and validated for 13 major allergenic taxa (Alnus, Artemisia, Betula, Castanea, Corylus, Cupressaceae, Olea, Plantago, Platanus, Populus, Poaceae, Quercus and Tilia) in different areas of France and Spain. The model has been integrated into a freeware called PPF (Positive Pollen Forecast), which will be made available from the 5th Framework EU project POSITIVE web page at: http://www.forst.tu-muenchen.de/LST/METEOR/ positive/.