TY - JOUR
AU - WILLIAMSON, MARK
AB -  MARK WILLIAMSON Department of Biology, University of York Key words. Population variability. Introduction Several suggestions have been published about how the variability of populations can be measured. The purpose of this note is to draw attention t o the relationship between some of these measures, in the context of the interesting paper on butterfly populations by Pollard ( 1984). Homogeneous populations The simplest case is when the size of a single population has been measured at various times. I will call such cases homogeneous populations, in contrast t o the more complex heterogeneous cases discussed below. I t is desirable to use a standard statistic on a scale which allows comparison between different populations, and for this the standard deviation of the Iogarithm of the population size is the natural choice (Williamson, 1972). Logarithms to the base 10 have been used by most authors. The distribution of population size is usually symmetrically distributed on the logarithmic scale, and the standard deviation is the obvious measure of spread in a near normal distribution. Using a logarithmic scale allows comparison of the relative variability of populations. Williamson ( 1972) suggested using the antilogarithm of 3 times the standard deviation t 
TI - The measurement of population variability
JF - Ecological Entomology
DO - 10.1111/j.1365-2311.1984.tb00719.x
DA - 1984-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/wiley/the-measurement-of-population-variability-8URjHsegFg
SP - 239
EP - 241
VL - 9
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -