Persistence versus extinction under a climate change in mixed environments

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the study of the persistence versus extinction of species in the reaction-diffusion equation: \begin{equation} u_t-\Delta u=f(t,x_1-ct,y,u) \quad\quad t>0,\ x\in\Omega,\nonumber \end{equation} where $\Omega$ is of cylindrical type or partially periodic domain, $f$ is of Fisher-KPP type and the scalar $c>0$ is a given forced speed. This type of equation originally comes from a model in population dynamics (see \cite{BDNZ},\cite{PL},\cite{SK}) to study the impact of climate change on the persistence versus extinction of species. From these works, we know that the dynamics is governed by the traveling fronts $u(t,x_1,y)=U(x_1-ct,y)$, thus characterizing the set of traveling fronts plays a major role. In this paper, we first consider a more general model than the model of \cite{BDNZ} in higher dimensional space, where the environment is only assumed to be globally unfavorable with favorable pockets extending to infinity. We consider in two frameworks: the reaction term is time-independent or time-periodic dependent. For the latter, we study the concentration of the species when the environment outside $\Omega$ becomes extremely unfavorable and further prove a symmetry breaking property of the fronts.