Table 1.

Summary statistics for n, CV and β_o, and values of N, N_1.5 and P_1.5. (Values presented for groups of indicators corresponding to primary FSE papers (aerial, Haughton et al. (2003); boundary, Roy et al. (2003); surface, Brooks et al. (2003); trophic, Hawes et al. (2003); vegetation, Heard et al. (2003)) and for all 531 indicators combined (all crops combined in each case), and for each crop (all indicators combined in each case). n is number of fields, and β_o is an estimate of the exponent in the power law relationship between variance and mean abundance, V=αμ^β. The N analyses of count indicators for each group were included in the summaries of n and CV, but only the subset of those analyses with n≥30 were included for β_o. N_1.5 is number of analyses with R>1.5 or R<0.67, and P_1.5 is proportion of those N_1.5 analyses that achieved significance at 5%. Values of n, CV and β_o for all 531 individual analyses are given in table A2 of the electronic supplementary material.)

	group/crop
aerial	boundary	surface	trophic	vegetation	all indicators	beet	maize	spring oilseed rape
N	106	119	151	107	48	531	188	165	178
mean n	40	45	48	51	59	47	47	43	52
min n	3	7	13	6	42	3	5	3	3
max n	65	67	67	67	66	67	66	58	67
mean CV	73.6	72.3	71.0	63.3	96.6	72.6	71.9	75.7	70.4
min CV	9.7	36.1	23.9	16.3	36.7	9.7	9.7	22.0	16.3
max CV	168.4	150.1	193.7	101.9	191.7	193.7	149.1	193.7	150.1
N1.5	19	23	28	13	27	110	37	43	30
P1.5	0.63	0.70	0.93	0.77	0.96	0.82	0.76	0.86	0.83
number of analyses with n≥30	74	90	132	99	48	443	149	134	160
median βo	1.71	1.53	1.67	1.76	1.81	1.68	1.69	1.74	1.61
lower quartile βo	1.38	1.32	1.50	1.49	1.65	1.46	1.43	1.56	1.43
upper quartile βo	2.02	1.75	1.87	1.96	1.97	1.92	1.95	1.96	1.84