On the long term spatial segregation for a competition–diffusion system

Abstract

We investigate the long term behavior for a class of competition-diffusion systems of Lotka-Volterra type for two competing species in the case of low regularity assumptions on the data. Due to the coupling that we consider the system cannot be reduced to a single equa- tion yielding uniform estimates with respect to the inter-specific competition rate parameter. Moreover, in the particular but meaningful case of initial data with disjoint support and Dirich- let boundary data which are time-independent, we prove that as the competition rate goes to infinity the solution converges, along with suitable sequences, to a spatially segregated state satisfying some variational inequalities.