Semi-wave and spreading speed for the diffusive competition model with a free boundary

Abstract

We determine the asymptotic spreading speed of an invasive species, which invades the territory of a native competitor, governed by a diffusive competition model with a free boundary in a spherically symmetric setting. This free boundary problem was studied recently in, but only rough bounds of the spreading speed were obtained there. We show in this paper that there exists an asymptotic spreading speed, which is determined by a certain traveling wave type system of one space dimension, called a semi-wave. This appears to be the first result that gives the precise asymptotic spreading speed for a two species system with free boundaries.