Macroscope Nexus: the Observatory →
PublicThe public Macroscope. Enter any coordinate on Earth and discover its ecological identity, read from terrain, climate, ecoregion and the living world.
macroscope.nexus · yea.earth, Your Ecological Address
Current work
All projects →Macroscope Reader →
In developmentThe fourth generation, built in the open and changing daily: about 1,170 curated places, from biological field stations and UC Natural Reserves to public lands and two instrumented home places, each read across four faces.
Science with Claude →
PublicStructured human-AI scientific investigations, and the essays in which the ideas behind the Macroscope are worked out in public, one morning at a time.
The Macroscope, measured 23 September 2026
≈1,170places in the catalog
30+live instruments at two home places
1,171geotagged panoramas at 43 places
532three-dimensional reconstructions
1941–2026aerial record at Owl Farm
100+recorded design rulings
The Macroscope
Read the introduction →The idea
A microscope makes the very small visible and a telescope the very far. A macroscope is for what is too large, too slow and too interconnected to see at once: a watershed, a season, an ecosystem, a life of paying attention to one piece of ground.
The grammar
The world arrives as coordinates. A place is a coordinate someone has decided matters and has curated. A survey is a bounded act of looking; the pulse is what keeps arriving between surveys. Places run from deeply known, walked and ground-truthed, to lightly sketched from public data, and the two are always told apart.
Four faces
Stand at any coordinate and it turns four faces toward you at once:
- EARTH climate, geology and water
- LIFE biodiversity and season
- HOME the built habitat
- SELF the observer, whose days are part of the record
How we think now
Essays at Science with Claude →- Intelligence that knows what it costs
- Simple routines on a small local server do most of the watching; a modest local model gathers the facts when something unusual appears; only the hardest questions go to the most capable and most expensive model. Most mornings the system says nothing at all.
- Trust as architecture, not promise
- Hardware we control is trusted, services we can verify are monitored, and neural-network outputs are quarantined as probabilistic claims. Privacy grows out of ownership: the weather at Canemah is public because the place is, while a person's health belongs to that person.
- Known, not owned
- Every curated place has a curator. Observations stay with the platforms and people who made them, and a rights envelope of source, license, method and uncertainty travels with every record.
- The naturalist inside the instrument
- The machine finds the irregular heartbeat; the biologist makes the diagnosis. The more capable the instrument becomes, the more it depends on what only a body in a place can observe.
- Two collaborators and a recorded ruling
- A field ecologist and an AI collaborator build the Macroscope in near-daily sessions. The human keeps the judgment, the machine does the engineering, and every design ruling is written down.
What comes next
Dreaming in NEON →Of peers we ask what the instrument asks of us: argue with it. Get in touch →
More projects
View all projects →The Lookout →
LivePhotographic studies from a digital naturalist's eye
NodeWorlds →
DemoText adventure with living data
Madverse →
LiveCollaborative puzzle poetry
Wiki-Lyrical Engine →
LiveCognitive poetry from the dream buffer
Quotes Collection →
LiveCurated wisdom across domains
Quotes Explorer →
LiveVisual navigation through ideas
Michael P. Hamilton →
LiveMy Virtual Field Station
Recent Documents
Browse archive →Wearable Sensor-Fusion Survey Rig
This note records the conceptual architecture for a wearable sensor-fusion rig intended to support ecoSPLAT surveys at Canemah Nature Laboratory...
July 23, 2026The Macroscope Data Logger Designer
The original Climate Analyst Data Logger Designer (CNL-TN-2026-052 v0.1) specified a Climate-Analyst-internal wizard that provisioned virtual weather...
April 16, 2026Macroscope Visual Language Specification
This specification establishes a portable visual language for Macroscope Next Generation (MNG) interfaces, derived from analysis of production CSS on...
April 15, 2026The Collaboratory Librarian
The Macroscope Collaboratory Librarian was instantiated in early April 2026 as a catalog system for Dr. Hamilton's personal library, initially...
April 13, 2026Macroscope Collaboratory Librarian: Unified Catalog and Document Ingestion Pipeline Specification
The Macroscope Collaboratory Librarian is the fourth panel of the I3 shell (Instruments, Investigations, Intelligence, Librarian) and serves as the...
April 11, 2026olmOCR-2 as the Canonical PDF Ingestion Engine
The first-light OCR evaluation on April 10, 2026 (see REPORT.md in `tests/ocr_bench/`) compared two text extraction pipelines against four PDFs:...
April 10, 2026Semantic Scholar API Integration for the Macroscope Collaboratory
An API key for the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph was obtained on April 11, 2026, providing authenticated access to Allen AI’s corpus of...
April 10, 2026The Macroscope Collaboratory
Versions 0.1 and 0.2 of this technical note documented the first-light test of the Investigation Wizard as a PHP in-request application driving the...
April 9, 2026The STRATA Substrate
STRATA 2.0's Observatory and Intelligence dashboards currently generate all sensor summaries, narrative text, and ecological context on demand --...
April 8, 2026STRATA IQ: Place-Based Ecological Intelligence
STRATA's intelligence tier currently operates without place. The temporal state endpoint assembles sensor readings from 26 platforms across four...
April 8, 2026