Taylor's Power Law

Taylor's Power Law: Order and Pattern in Nature is a broad synthesis of this ubiquitous property of natural and manmade phenomena. This stimulating and approachable work surveys the biological and non-biological empirical data, describes the statistical uses of Taylor’s Power Law (TPL) and its relationship to statistical distributions, exposes the mathematical connections to other power laws, covers the competing explanatory models, and develops an argument for TPL's genesis. Taylor’s power law relates the variability of a process or population to its average value and has recognized in microbiology, genetics, economics, astronomy, physics and computer science.

Both biologists who know the law as Taylor's power law and physical scientists who know it as fluctuation scaling will be interested in the bigger picture on this fascinating subject. As the relationship between variance and mean is found in so wide a range of disciplines, it seems possible it is a deep property of number, not just a phenomenon in ecology as was originally thought.

• Provides a single reference on the properties, scope and limitations of Taylor’s power law
• Reports the empirical, analytical and theoretical work without opinion
• Brings together thoughts and suggestions from the hundreds who have written and speculated on Taylor’s power law

Biologists, ecologists, entomologists, agriculture scientists, plant pathologists, field biologists, forestry managers, fisheries managers, applied statisticians, geographers, researchers in demographics, computer scientists, applied mathematicians, physicists and other physical scientists, graduate/advanced UG students in biological sciences

I. Introduction to Population Spatial Patterns
II. Description and History
III. Indices of Aggregation
IV. Uses of TPL
V. Empirical Evidence ‐ 1 Ecology and Agriculture
VI. Other biological
VII. Empirical Evidence ‐ 2 Non‐biological
VIII. Empirical Evidence ‐ 3 Properties
IX. Counter Examples
X. Relationship to TPL
XI. Models to Generate TL ‐ Introduction
XII. Models to Generate TPL ‐ Biology Based
XIII. Models to Generate TPL ‐ Physics Based
XIV. Models to Generate TPL ‐ Mathematical
XV. Synthesis and Discussion
XVI. Conclusion
XVII. Appendices
XVIII. Tables of Results
XIX. Citation Index
XX. Subject Index