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Professor Joel E. Cohen, Laboratory of Populations,The Rockefeller University, “Taylor’s law of fluctuation scaling and other variance functions: where do they come from and what can they tell us?”
January 21, 2020 @ 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Presentation: “Taylor’s law of fluctuation scaling and other variance functions: where do they come from and what can they tell us?
Speaker: Dr. Joel E. Cohen, The Rockefeller University & Columbia University
Host: Eminent Scholar Robert D. Holt | Department of Biology
Email: rdholt@.ufl.edu
Abstract: Taylor’s law (TL) of fluctuation scaling describes population size or population density or some other nonnegative quantity when the variance of a set of measurements is a power function of the mean of that set of measurements, in a collection of multiple sets of measures: variance=a⋅mean^b,a>0. This talk will survey the data structure necessary to test TL empirically, review some recent empirical examples of successes and failures of TL, discuss some of the challenges of interpreting the parameters of TL, and describe some practical applications and limitations of TL and other variance functions.