Refuge versus dispersion in the logistic equation (Q515515)

The authors consider a logistic equation with nonlinear diffusion arising in population dynamics written as \(-\Delta (u+a(x)u^{r})=\lambda u-b(x)u^{p}\) posed in a smooth and bounded domain in \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\), \(N\geq 1\). Homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions \(u=0\) are imposed on \(\partial \Omega \). Here \(u\) is the density of the population, \(p,r>1\), and \(b\in C( \overline{\Omega },\mathbb{R}_{+})\) and \(a\in C^{2}(\overline{\Omega }, \mathbb{R}_{+})\) are regular functions which can vanish on subsets of \( \Omega \). The function \(a\) denotes the type of diffusion movement of the species. The main results of the paper prove existence and uniqueness of positive solutions first when \(b\) is identically equal to 0 and then in the general case, assuming that \(\lambda \) belongs to some open interval in each case. The authors also describe the behavior of these solutions when the parameter \(\lambda \) goes to each of the bounds of these intervals. For the proofs, the authors first introduce a change of variables which brings the above problem to \(\Delta w=\lambda q(x,w)-b(x)q(x,w)^{p}\) and they mainly use bifurcation techniques, the sub-, super-solution method and appropriate large solutions.