Dispersal towards food: the singular limit of an Allen-Cahn equation

J Math Biol. 2018 Feb;76(3):531-565. doi: 10.1007/s00285-017-1150-5. Epub 2017 Jun 19.

Abstract

The effect of dispersal under heterogeneous environment is studied in terms of the singular limit of an Allen-Cahn equation. Since biological organisms often slow down their dispersal if food is abundant, a food metric diffusion is taken to include such a phenomenon. The migration effect of the problem is approximated by a mean curvature flow after taking the singular limit which now includes an advection term produced by the spatial heterogeneity of food distribution. It is shown that the interface moves towards a local maximum of the food distribution. In other words, the dispersal taken in the paper is not a trivialization process anymore, but an aggregation one towards food.

Keywords: Fokker–Planck type diffusion; Food metric; Generation and propagation of interface; Perturbed motion by mean curvature; Singular limit.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animal Distribution*
  • Animal Migration
  • Animals
  • Computational Biology
  • Food Chain
  • Food*
  • Mathematical Concepts
  • Models, Biological*
  • Population Dynamics