We consider a tripartite quantum system comprising a Λ-atom interacting with two radiation fields in the presence of field nonlinearities and an intensity-dependent field-atom coupling. In earlier work, a bifurcation cascade was shown to occur in the short-time dynamics of the mean photon number Ni(t) (i = 1, 2) corresponding to either field. A special value κ of the intensity parameter κ was identified, that separates collapse to a constant value and oscillatory behavior of Ni(t) as well as the entanglement of the atomic subsystem. In this paper, we carry out a detailed time-series analysis and establish an interesting correlation in the behavior of both the short-time and long-time dynamics of Ni(t) . In particular, we study the manner in which the Lyapunov exponents, return maps, recurrence plots and recurrence statistics vary with κ. The variation of the maximum Lyapunov exponent with κ exhibits a minimum at κ. The return maps, recurrence plots and first-return-time distributions also carry signatures of this special value, as do the clustering coefficient and the transitivity of networks constructed from the time series. These signatures are present independent of the manner in which the networks are constructed from the time series. The novelty in our results lies in the unanticipated correlation between a special feature of the bifurcation cascade in the short-time dynamics of the system, on the one hand, and network behavior and diverse system properties deduced through the time-series analysis, on the other. Our work also brings out the usefulness of applying techniques from nonlinear dynamics to analyze the behavior of expectation values of observables in multipartite quantum mechanical systems.