Study of a cannibalistic prey–predator model with Allee effect in prey under the presence of diffusion

In this study, we have investigated the temporal and spatio-temporal behavior of a prey–predator model with weak Allee effect in prey and the quality of being cannibalistic in a specialist predator. The parameters responsible for the Allee effect and cannibalism impact both the existence and stability of coexistence steady states of the temporal system. The temporal system exhibits various kinds of local bifurcations such as saddle–node, Hopf, Generalized Hopf (Bautin), Bogdanov–Takens, and global bifurcation like homoclinic, saddle–node bifurcation of limit cycles. For the model with self-diffusion, we establish the non-negativity and prior bounds of the solution. Subsequently, we derive the theoretical conditions in which self-diffusion leads to the destabilization of the interior equilibrium. Additionally, we explore the conditions under which cross-diffusion induces the Turing-instability where self-diffusion fails to do so. Further, we present different kinds of stationary and dynamic patterns on varying the values of diffusion coefficients to depict the spatio-temporal model’s rich dynamics. It has been found that the addition of self and cross-diffusion in a prey–predator model with the Allee effect in prey and cannibalistic predator play essential roles in comprehending the pattern formation of a distributed population model. It is expected that the comprehensive mathematical analysis and extensive numerical simulations used in investigating the global dynamics of the proposed model can facilitate researchers in studying the temporal and spatial aspects of prey–predator models in more significant detail.