The book is divided in 43 short chapters ordered by date and roughly covering a whole year.[1] In each of them the author, which visits almost every day a single square meter randomly chosen of an old-growth forest of Cumberland Plateau (Tennessee), describes what happens to plants, animals and insects living there. These observations give him the opportunity to write not only about the small-scale forest ecology but also on worldwide natural processes. He often calls his small observation field mandala ,[2] inspired by the paintings of sand created by Tibetan as a support for meditati
Logistically, one could certainly draw a 1x1 meter square and import the KML file for it to iNat as a “Place”. My understanding is that the main concern with adding new Places is that the large ones take a while to process and can slow the website, so I imagine a tiny one like that wouldn’t be a problem. In terms of whether this is a practice that’s encouraged or discouraged, I have no idea. I’m sure someone on the iNat staff will chime in one way or the other on that.
If you want to do something like this yourself, you could also just set up a traditional project, tag your observations with something like “my square meter”, and manually add them into your project. Then you could easily keep track of all of them and wouldn’t need to bother with setting up a place.
You can also use tags or observation fields on your observations to group them together.
The variability of GPS would make that a difficult project to document on iNat relying on location alone (presuming not all observations of interest are manually placed on the map).