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Winner of 2013 Best Book Award from the National Academies. Finalist for 2013 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.Winner of the 2013 Reed Environmental Writing Award. Winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature.Runner-up for 2013 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.A biologist reveals the secret world hidden in a single square meter of forestIn this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one- square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature's path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life.Each of this book's short chapters begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers.