An optimization problem and its application in population dynamics

This paper is concerned with a diffusive logistic model in population ecology. As observed by Y. Lou, in a spatially heterogeneous environment, this model can always support a total population at equilibrium greater than the total carrying capacity. In other words, the ratio of the total population at equilibrium to the total carrying capacity is always larger than 1. Our goal is to find the supremum of this ratio taken over all possible choices of spatial distributions of resources and the species’ dispersal rate. A conjecture proposed by W.-M. Ni is that, in the one-dimensional case, the supremum is 3. We settle this conjecture and then apply our result to study the global dynamics of a heterogeneous Lotka-Volterra competition-diffusion system.