Periodic tridiagonal systems modeling competitive-cooperative ecological interactions (Q558588)

The authors consider systems of ordinary differential equations of the type \[ \dot{x_{1}} = x_{1}f_{1}(t,x_{1},x_{2}), \;\dot{x_{i}} = x_{i}f_{i}(t,x_{i-1},x_{i},x_{i+1}), \;2\leq i \leq n-1, \;\dot{x_{n}} = x_{n}f_{n}(t,x_{n-1},x_{n}), \] where \(f = (f_{1},f_{2},...,f_{n})\) is defined on \(\mathbb{R}\times U,\) \(U\) a nonempty open subset of \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) containing \(\mathbb{R}_{+}^{n}\) (the set of \(n-\)vectors with nonnegative components). It is assumed that the functions \(f_{i}\) and their partial derivatives with respect to the \(x_{j}\) are continuous, that \[ \displaystyle \frac{\partial f_{i}}{\partial x_{i+1}} (t,x) \displaystyle \frac{\partial f_{i+1}}{\partial x_{i}} (t,x) > 0, \;1 \leq i \leq n-1, \] and that the function \(f\) is \(T-\)periodic with respect to \(t.\) The system above models an ecosystem of \(n\), \(n\geq 2\), species with cooperative-competitive interactions. The authors investigate the dynamics of the Poincaré map associated with the previous system showing that the limit-set is either a fixed-point or is contained in the boundary of the positive cone and itself contains a cycle of fixed-points. Moreover, it is proved that if \(n \leq 4,\) then any bounded solution is asymptotic to a \(T-\)periodic solution.