Consequences of Environmental Fluctuations on Taylor's Power Law and Implications for the Dynamics and Persistence of Populations

摘要

Conservation Biologists have found that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase exponentially with population size. This has proved helpful in analyses determining extinction times and characterizing the pathway to extinction. The aim of this investigation is to explore the possible interactions between environmental/demographic noises and the scaling effect of the mean population size with its variance, which is expected to follow Taylor's power law relationship. We showed that the combined effects of environmental/ demographic noises and the scaling of population size variability interact with the population dynamics and affect the mean time to extinction.