In 2022, Seattle-based children’s book author and illustrator Amy Hevron and her agent shopped around Hevron’s idea of a six-book “Tiny Habitats” series. Each picture book would feature a different miniature ecosystem and the small plants and animals that inhabit it.

A publishing company called Beach Lane Books snapped up the idea, and the first two books in the series were published last year.

Hevron prefers using acrylic paint on wood panels, incorporating the underlying texture of wood grain into her illustrations. She also adds layers of pencil and charcoal drawings and combines these layers in a digital collage for the final artwork for each book.

For the first book, “Log Life,” Hevron turned to a type of micro-habitat that is familiar to everyone in our region: the humble but fecund nurse log. She shows that whenever a mature tree is felled by a storm or old age and ends up on the forest floor, it takes on a new function as the host to all sorts of diminutive forms of life.

Using the time frame of one year, ten years, and a century, Hevron checks back in to see what kinds of life have established a foothold in the nurse log: at first, it’s lichen and liverwort, fungi and hornwort, followed by slime molds, slugs, fern spores and moss.

“Snails vacayed in the decay,” she writes. “Tree frogs cooled down in the dark dens.”

And a fir seedling that sprouted in the fallen tree’s spongy detritus stretches toward the sky.

The second Tiny Habitats book, “Sunken Ship,” is set in the Florida Keys and is based on an actual shipwreck. A treasure-bearing ship was swamped by stormy seas in the year 1733. After it sank and settled on the floor, Hevron explains that it became “a treasure ship of a different kind.”

In year one, algae and piddocks and gribbles took up residence.

Over the next decade, “Many moons passed overhead, while below, the sunken ship became an underwater nursery.”

Wrasses and stingrays and turtles moved in, and through, as a coral reef established itself over the ensuing years.

Hevron’s colorful illustrations and evocative vocabulary convey the remarkable abundance and diversity of life that exists even in these wee patches of habitat. And while the series is intended as an introduction to the concept of ecological succession at a scale that is particularly relatable to young children, the books should prompt even those of us who are older to pay more attention to the tiny but busy lives around us.

Next month, the third book in this Tiny Habitats series will be released. In “Poop Pile on the Prairie,” the publishers promise that you’ll be able to “get the scoop on bison poop and the tiny ecosystem it creates.”

Later this year, another book in the series will focus on pond life in the tropics.

The end matter for each book provides more information and book lists to encourage further curiosity and conversation. Then set off on your own mini-walkabout!

“Log Life” and the Tiny Habitats series by Amy Hevron

Beach Lane Books — 48 pp — $18.99