A notable and consistent ecological observation known for
a long time is that spatial variance in the abundance of a
species increases with its mean abundance and that this relationship typically conforms well to a simple
power law (Taylor 1961). Indeed, such models can be
used at a spectrum of spatial scales to describe spatial
variance in the abundance of a single species at different
times or in different regions and of different species across the same set of areas (Taylor et al. 1978; Taylor and Woiwod 1982)
