PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #9: Theoretical Ecology -- Populations, interactions.
Presiding: D. Srivastava
Monday, August 5. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM. Grand Ballroom Central, Radisson.

Taylor power laws as a consequence of population growth processes.

Ballantyne, Ford^*,1, ¹ University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

ABSTRACT- The relationship between mean abundance and variation in abundance has been well documented for many taxa and usually follows a power law. Previous explanations have focused on dispersal and spatial movement. I show that Taylor power laws are, in some sense, the null expectaton for discrete-time as well as continuous-time population growth models. The Taylor power laws generated by such population growth models yield slopes of 2. This is an upper bound for empirically calculated Taylor power laws, which range from 1 to 2 in slope. I discuss possible reasons for the empirical deviation from the null slope of 2 and the functional basis for the values of parameters in population growth models.

KEY WORDS: taylor power law, scaling, variance