Fig. 3: Implications of a power law scaling for future disturbance waves.
From: Taylor’s law predicts unprecedented pulses of forest disturbance under global change
a Distribution of realized annual disturbance rates simulated from a log-normal distribution (10,000 random draws) with three different hypothetical annual disturbance rates (colors) and the variance parameter scaled by means of Taylor’s law with a power law exponent of b = 2.2 (as estimated for natural disturbances in this study, see Fig. 1). For higher average disturbance rates, the distribution of annual disturbance rates does not only shift but also increase in widths, leading to a higher probability of high disturbance rates in relation to the mean. b Changes in the probability of observing a year with annual disturbance rates greater than 1.0%, 2.5%, or 5.0% as the mean disturbance rate increases from 0 to 2% yr. 1, assuming mean disturbance rate and temporal variability scale according to Taylor’s law (power law exponent of b = 2.2).
