Importance of power-law distributions in ecology

Created: 5th May 2025 (by Utsav Biswas, 2nd yr PhD, TEELab, CES, IISc) Purpose: Description of git-hub repo - 'Importance of power-law distributions in ecology' Project summary: Me (Utsav Biswas) & Vishu (Vishwesha Guttal) have written an article on 'Importance of power-law distributions in ecology'. Here we give the reader an idea about power-law distributions in general & why they are fascinating. Thereafter we mention their advantage & provide examples of different systems in which power-laws have been found. This repo contains the R codes to generate the figures that are present in this article.

The codes are tested to run on RStudio Build 524.

Required R packages - 'ggplot2' 'gridExtra' 'poweRlaw' 'animation'

All codes are self explanatory and have been commented wherever necessary. Codes -

1. Code file name: Figure 2a,b,c (For Figures 2a, 2b and 2c)
2. Code file name: Figure 2d,e,f (For Figures 2d, 2e and 2f)
3. Code file name: Figure 3a (For Figure 3a)
4. Code file name: Figure 3b (For Figure 3b)
5. Code file name: Figure 3c (For Figure 3c)
6. Code file name: Figure 4a (For Figure 4a)
7. Code file name: Figure 4b (For Figure 4b)