Our Faculty

Publications

Xu, M., Kolding, J. & Cohen, J. E. (2016). Taylor's power law and fixed-precision sampling: application to abundance of fish sampled by gillnets in an African lake. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjfas-2016-0009#.V_O_yeArKUk

Xu, M. (2015). Ecological scaling laws link individual body size variation to population abundance fluctuation. Oikos. Vol 125 , pages 288-299.

Cohen, J. E. & Xu, M. (2015). Random sampling of skewed distributions implies Taylor's power law of fluctuation scaling. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol 112 (Issue 25) , pages 7749–7754.

Cohen, J. E. & Xu, M. (2015). Reply to Chen: Under specified assumptions, adequate random samples of skewed distributions obey Taylor's law. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol 112 (Issue 25) , pages E3157–E3158.

Xu, M., Schuster, W. S. & Cohen, J. E. (2015). Robustness of Taylor's law under spatial hierarchical groupings of forest tree samples. Population Ecology. Vol 57 (Issue 1) , pages 93–103.

Xu, M. (2015). Taylor's power law: before and after 50 years of scientific scrutiny. arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.02033.

PRESENTATIONS

Xu, M. (2015, August 10). 100th ESA Annual Meeting. Robustness of Taylor's law under spatial hierarchical groupingsof forest tree samples. Baltimore, MD

Xu, M. (2014, October 11). 7th International Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology. Stochastic multiplicative population growth predicts and interprets Taylor's law of fluctuation scaling. Claremont, CA

RESEARCH INTEREST

My general research interests are ecological scaling relationships and their mathematical modeling. My current research topic is Taylor's power law (TPL) of fluctuation scaling, which describes the power-law relationship between mean and variance of population abundance. I have studied the underlying mechanism of TPL using the stochastic multiplicative population dynamics models, used TPL to select best demographic projections of Norwegian county population density, and applied TPL to design fixed-precision sampling program for freshwater fish. In future projects I plan to integrate the ubiquitous TPL with other scaling patterns to understand fluctuations across multiple biological levels. Students who are seeking research projects can check out my personal website or send me an email to schedule a research discussion.