A diffusive stage-structured model in a polluted environment (Q2490079)

The paper deals with the asymptotic behaviour of the solutions of a model for the effect of the diffusion of a contaminant in a population distributed in two age groups. The authors consider a four reaction-diffusion equations model for, respectively, the densities of immature and mature individuals in the population and the concentrations of the free pollutant and the pollutant inside the body of the immature individuals, supplemented by no-flux boundary conditions in a bounded domain. The system has two possible nonnegative homogeneous stationary solutions. One of them, with no population but with non-zero concentration of the two classes of pollutant, is globally attracting if the parameters satisfy some condition. The other, a strictly positive (nontrivial) equilibrium, exists only if the precedent condition does not hold, and it is globally attracting under some more restrictive conditions on the parameters, even when the diffusion coefficients vanish. If these diffusion coefficients are sufficiently large the nontrivial equilibrium can be stable even when the mentioned conditions do not hold. The results on global stability are obtained by means of extensive use of suitable Liapunov functions.