YEA Labs: A Research Instrument Suite for Quantitative Ecological Analysis

@techreport{laboratory2026yea, author = {Laboratory, Michael P. Hamilton, Canemah Nature, Ph.D.}, title = {YEA Labs: A Research Instrument Suite for Quantitative Ecological Analysis}, institution = {Canemah Nature Laboratory}, year = {2026}, number = {CNL-TN-2026-030}, month = {march}, url = {https://canemah.org/archive/document.php?id=CNL-TN-2026-030}, abstract = {YEA Labs is a web-based research instrument suite integrated into the Your Ecological Address (YEA) platform at yea.earth. The system provides five operational instruments for quantitative ecological analysis across a curated network of 1,142 natural areas spanning six continents. Each instrument shares a common place selection system with advanced faceted filtering across geographic, organizational, and ecological dimensions, enabling researchers to navigate between analytical perspectives while maintaining place context. The architecture is built on a LAMP stack with vanilla JavaScript, Chart.js for visualization, Mapbox GL for cartography, and the iNaturalist API for biodiversity data. A batch enrichment pipeline caches non-ephemeral ecological data from eight geospatial APIs, providing instant habitat characterization without live API calls. This note documents the system architecture, the five operational instruments, the data enrichment infrastructure, and the planned development of research session management, cross-instrument pattern analysis, and AI-assisted interpretive synthesis.} }