Population dynamics in river networks: analysis of steady states

We study the population dynamics of an aquatic species in a river network. The habitat is viewed as a binary tree-like metric graph with the population density satisfying a reaction-diffusion-advection equation on each edge, along with the appropriate junction and boundary conditions. In the case of a linear reaction term and hostile downstream boundary condition, the question of persistence in such models was studied by Sarhad, Carlson and Anderson. We focus on the case of a nonlinear (logistic) reaction term and use an outflow downstream boundary condition. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a positive steady state solution for a simple Y-shaped river network (with a single junction). We show that the existence of a positive steady state is equivalent to the persistence condition for the linearized model. The method can be generalized to a binary tree-like river network with an arbitrary number of segments.