We argue that ‘locality’, perhaps the most mundane term in ecology, holds a basic ambiguity: two concepts of space—nomothetic and idiographic—which are both necessary for a rigorous resurvey to “the same” locality in the field, are committed to different practices with no common measurement. A case study unfolds the failure of the standard assumption that an exogenous grid of longitude and latitude, as fine-grained as one wishes, suffices for revisiting a species locality. We briefly suggest a scale-dependent “resolution” for this replication problem, since it has no general, rational solution.