Abstract
Competition between species for resources is a fundamental ecological process, which can be modeled by the mathematical models in the chemostat culture or in the water column. The chemostat-type models for resource competition have been extensively analyzed. However, the study on the competition for resources in the water column has been relatively neglected as a result of some technical dificulties. We consider a resource competition model with two species in the water column. Firstly, the global existence and L∞ boundedness of solutions to the model are established by inequality estimates. Secondly, the uniqueness of positive steady state solutions and some dynamical behavior of the single population model are attained by degree theory and uniform persistence theory. Finally, the structure of the coexistence solutions of the two-species system is investigated by the global bifurcation theory.