Stationary pattern of a diffusive prey–predator model with trophic intersections of three levels

Abstract

The paper is concerned with a diffusive prey–predator model subject to the homogeneous Neumann boundary condition, which models the trophic intersections of three levels. We will prove that under certain assumptions, even though the unique positive constant steady state is globally asymptotically stable for the dynamics with diffusion, the non-constant positive steady state can exist due to the emergence of cross-diffusion. We demonstrate that the cross-diffusion can create stationary pattern. Moreover, we treat the cross-diffusion parameter as a bifurcation parameter and discuss the existence of non-constant positive solutions to the system with cross-diffusion.