A time-periodic competition model with nonlocal dispersal and bistable nonlinearity: propagation dynamics and stability

TL;DR

This paper investigates traveling wave solutions in a seasonal, nonlocal dispersal competition model, establishing their existence, stability, and propagation speeds, with implications for understanding species invasion in heterogeneous environments.

Contribution

It introduces new analytical results on the existence, uniqueness, and stability of traveling waves in a time-periodic nonlocal competition system, including explicit conditions for wave speeds.

Findings

Existence and stability of traveling wave solutions established.

Explicit conditions for positive and negative wave speeds derived.

Simulations support theoretical results under weak conditions.

Abstract

Seasonality frequently occurs in population models, and the corresponding seasonal patterns have been of great interest to scientists. This paper is concerned with traveling waves to a time-periodic bistable Lotka-Volterra competition system with nonlocal dispersal. We first establish the existence, uniqueness and stability of traveling wave solutions for this system. Then, by utilizing comparison principle and the stability property, the relationship among the bistable wave speed, the asymptotic propagation speeds of the associated monotone subsystems and the speed of upper/lower solutions is obtained. Next, explicit sufficient conditions for positive and negative bistable wave speeds are derived. Our explicit results are derived by constructing particular upper/lower solutions with specific asymptotical behaviors, which can be seen as case studies shedding light on further studies and improvements. Finally, the theoretical results are corroborated under weak conditions by direct simulations of the underlying time-periodic system with nonlocal dispersal. The combined impact of competition, dispersal and seasonality on the invasion direction has shed new light on the modelings and analysis of population competition and species invasion in heterogeneous media.