Taylor's power law: before and after 50 years of scientific scrutiny

TL;DR

This paper reviews the historical development, empirical validation, and theoretical explanations of Taylor's power law in ecology over the past 50 years, highlighting its widespread applicability and ongoing research challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of the origins, empirical confirmations, and theoretical models related to Taylor's power law, and discusses future research directions.

Findings

Confirmed for thousands of species and quantities

Numerous theories proposed to explain mechanisms

Lacks understanding of historical origins

Abstract

Taylor's power law is one of the mostly widely known empirical patterns in ecology discovered in the 20th century. It states that the variance of species population density scales as a power-law function of the mean population density. Taylor's power law was named after the British ecologist Lionel Roy Taylor. During the past half-century, Taylor's power law was confirmed for thousands of biological species and even for non-biological quantities. Numerous theories and models have been proposed to explain the mechanisms of Taylor's power law. However an understanding of the historical origin of this ubiquitous scaling pattern is lacking. This work reviews two research aspects that are fundamental to the discovery of Taylor's power law and provides an outlook of its future studies.