ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Random sampling of skewed distributions implies Taylor's power law of fluctuation scaling.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Phenotypic Flexibility in the City: A Meta-Analysis on Variation.Ecology letters · 2026Pooled it
- A global meta-analysis reveals higher variation in breeding phenology in urban birds than in their non-urban neighbours.Ecology letters · 2022Pooled it
- Terrestrial ecosystem restoration increases biodiversity and reduces its variability, but not to reference levels: A global meta-analysis.Ecology letters · 2022Pooled it
- A generalized scaling law reveals synchrony-driven reorganization of brain dynamics across human lifespan.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Variation in Tree Growth Increases With Global Warming.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Statistical patterns in the Ethereum blockchain: Analysis of EOAs and smart contracts in ERC20 token network.PloS one · 2026Article
- Taylor's law predicts unprecedented pulses of forest disturbance under global change.Nature communications · 2025Article
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- Asynchronous abundance fluctuations can drive giant genotype frequency fluctuations.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Asynchronous abundance fluctuations can drive giant genotype frequency fluctuations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
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- Universal abundance fluctuations across microbial communities, tropical forests, and urban populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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- The effects of an obesogenic diet on behavior and cognition in zebrafish (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Power law analysis of the human milk microbiome.Archives of microbiology · 2022Article
- Variance in Landscape Connectivity Shifts Microbial Population Scaling.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Meta-analysis of variation suggests that embracing variability improves both replicability and generalizability in preclinical research.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Spatial heterogeneity analysis of the human virome with Taylor's power law.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2021Article
- Spatial and temporal autocorrelations affect Taylor's law for US county populations: Descriptive and predictive models.PloS one · 2021Article
- Macroecological laws describe variation and diversity in microbial communities.Nature communications · 2020Article
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Abstract
Taylor's law (TL), a widely verified quantitative pattern in ecology and other sciences, describes the variance in a species' population density (or other nonnegative quantity) as a power-law function of the mean density (or other nonnegative quantity): Approximately, variance = a(mean)(b), a > 0. Multiple mechanisms have been proposed to explain and interpret TL. Here, we show analytically that observations randomly sampled in blocks from any skewed frequency distribution with four finite moments give rise to TL. We do not claim this is the only way TL arises. We give approximate formulae for the TL parameters and their uncertainty. In computer simulations and an empirical example using basal area densities of red oak trees from Black Rock Forest, our formulae agree with the estimates obtained by least-squares regression. Our results show that the correlated sampling variation of the mean and variance of skewed distributions is statistically sufficient to explain TL under random sampling, without the intervention of any biological or behavioral mechanisms. This finding connects TL with the underlying distribution of population density (or other nonnegative quantity) and provides a baseline against which more complex mechanisms of TL can be compared.
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