Multiple steady-states in phytoplankton population induced by photoinhibition

Abstract

We study the effect of photoinhibition in a nonlocal reaction-diffusion-advection equation, which models the dynamics of a single phytoplankton species in a water column where the growth of the species depends solely on light. Our results show that, in contrast to the case of no photoinhibition, where at most one positive steady state can exist, the model with photoinhibition possesses at least two positive steady states in certain parameter ranges. Our approach involves bifurcation theory and perturbation-reduction arguments.