Roy Taylor (ecologist)

Lionel Roy Taylor (14 December 1924 – 26 January 2007) was a British ecologist, president of the British Ecological Society 1984/85, and editor of the Journal of Animal Ecology.

Following his education at Manchester Central High School, Taylor had a spell as clerk with the CWS in Manchester, followed by 5 years in the RAF as a wireless mechanic and later as an EVT (Educational Vocational Training) lecturer in maths and physics.

He arrived at Rothamsted Experimental Station, Harpenden, in 1948 as an assistant experimental officer in the entomology department to work with Dr C G Johnson on the black bean aphid. His early work on aphids with Johnson started a lifelong interest in the behaviour, ecology, migration and population dynamics of this group of worldwide agricultural pests. Soon he began working on the development of suction traps for sampling small flying insects, such as aphids. These were among of the first effective quantitative sampling devices for insect populations.

In 1961 Taylor published in the journal Nature a paper "Aggregation, variance and the mean", which proposed a relationship between the mean and variance of ecological samples and was to become known as "Taylor’s power law". This is one of the few general law-like relationships in ecology. In the following decades Taylor's law was observed in a variety of circumstances in areas such as ecology, epidemiology and genetics, ranging from the number of sexual partners reported by HIV infected individuals (Anderson et al., 1988) to the physical distribution of genes on human chromosome 7.

To provide sufficient population data to take his ideas forward he enlisted the help of amateur moth enthusiasts to run light traps throughout the UK. In 1964, he extended this work to aphids by setting up a national network of specially designed 40-foot (12.2m) high suction traps. Together the light and suction-trap networks became known as the Rothamsted Insect Survey. Data from the Insect Survey have been used by Taylor and colleagues for a wide range of studies including pest forecasting, spatio-temporal population dynamics, biodiversity and climate change studies. The Insect Survey continues to provide unique datasets which are in regular use by researchers. Today the Rothamsted insect survey monitors more than 800 insect species of aphids and moths. The results of the British trap network are published in a weekly 'Pest Advisory Bulletin'. The aphid early-warning system has been extended into Europe—from Scandinavia to Italy and as far east as Poland.

...
Wikipedia