Macroscope

The Macroscope Ecological Observatory is a live, browser-based environmental monitoring dashboard that integrates continuous data streams from a Tempest weather station, BirdWeather acoustic sensors, and iNaturalist community observations at a single coordinate in Oregon City, Oregon. The system captures environmental conditions, bird vocalizations, and biodiversity observations in real time, then applies statistical pattern analysis to detect anomalies across domains — flagging ecological events that no single sensor would reveal on its own. Conceived in the late 1980s as a LaserDisc-based tool for navigating ecological imagery across spatial scales, the Macroscope has evolved over four decades into a working prototype of the instrument rack principle: intelligence emerging not from any single data source but from the joint distribution across all of them.