Diffusive KPP Equations with Free Boundaries in Time Almost Periodic Environments: I. Spreading and Vanishing Dichotomy

TL;DR

This paper establishes a dichotomy in the spreading or vanishing of species modeled by diffusive KPP equations with free boundaries in time almost periodic environments, extending previous results to more complex temporal settings.

Contribution

It proves the spreading-vanishing dichotomy for free boundary KPP equations in time almost periodic environments, a novel extension of prior simpler cases.

Findings

Species either successfully spreads or dies out.

The results extend known dichotomies to more complex temporal environments.

First demonstration of such dichotomy in time almost periodic settings.

Abstract

In this series of papers, we investigate the spreading and vanishing dynamics of time almost periodic diffusive KPP equations with free boundaries. Such equations are used to characterize the spreading of a new species in time almost periodic environments with free boundaries representing the spreading fronts. In this first part, we show that a spreading-vanishing dichotomy occurs for such free boundary problems, that is, the species either successfully spreads to all the new environment and stabilizes at a time almost periodic positive solution, or it fails to establish and dies out eventually. The results of this part extend the existing results on spreading-vanishing dichotomy for time and space independent, or time periodic and space independent, or time independent and space periodic diffusive KPP equations with free boundaries. The extension is nontrivial and is ever done for the first time.