Springer Science and Business Media LLC

We study a Lotka–Volterra type weak competition model with a free boundary in a one-dimensional habitat. The main objective is to understand the asymptotic behavior of two competing species spreading via a free boundary. We also provide some sufficient conditions for spreading success and spreading failure, respectively. Finally, when spreading successfully, we provide an estimate to show that the spreading speed (if exists) cannot be faster than the minimal speed of traveling wavefront solutions for the competition model on the whole real line without a free boundary.