Taylor's Power Law: Order and Pattern in Nature is a broad synthesis of this ubiquitous property of natural and man-made 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. It was first described in relation to insect populations and then more broadly to other animal and plant populations. Subsequently it has been recognized in microbiology, genetics, economics, astronomy, physics, and computer science, and it is thought to be one of the few general laws in ecology where it is routinely used to describe the spatial and temporal distributions of populations. 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 thought originally. Although theories abound that purport to explain or predict TPL, none is entirely satisfactory either because it fails to be very predictive, or it does not account for all the available empirical data. To uncover such a property requires a synthesis across disciplines, an acute need that is fulfilled by this exciting work. Provides a single reference describing the properties, scope, and limitations of Taylor's power lawReports the empirical, analytical, and theoretical work without opinion and ends with a critique of the work in order to develop a synthesisCollect together thoughts and suggestions of the hundreds who have written and speculated about Taylor's power law in order to review examples (and counter-examples), as well as examine the various models developed to account for it INDICE: 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
- ISBN: 978-0-12-810987-8
- Editorial: Academic Press
- Encuadernacion: Rústica
- Páginas: 516
- Fecha Publicación: 01/06/2019
- Nº Volúmenes: 1
- Idioma: Inglés