| NSF Org: |
DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | June 30, 2011 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | May 2, 2014 |
| Award Number: | 1115112 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Reed Beaman
rsbeaman@nsf.gov (703)292-7163 DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2011 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $2,308,384.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $2,308,384.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2012 = $649,408.00 FY 2014 = $343,875.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
506 S WRIGHT ST URBANA IL US 61801-3620 (217)333-2187 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
506 S WRIGHT ST URBANA IL US 61801-3620 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Digitization, Physiol Mechs & Biomechanics |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.074 |
ABSTRACT
This project will create InvertNet, an on-line virtual museum comprising >50 million insect and related arthropod specimens housed at 22 Midwestern institutions, focusing on the research theme of effects of land use changes on the biota of the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi River drainage basins. These collections document 160 years of environmental change and are an invaluable and irreplaceable resource but, at present, are largely inaccessible to scientists and the general public. Most previous efforts to capture and disseminate invertebrate collection data have focused on label data alone. InvertNet will use advanced digitization and networking technologies to capture and display 2D and 3D images of specimens and labels, and incorporate them into a searchable database. These new techniques should reduce the cost of digitizing insect specimens substantially.
By allowing users to find and view detailed images of specimens of particular species and their associated data labels, InvertNet will provide universal access to collections previously restricted to researchers. It will include links to the popular BugGuide.net insect identification website and to other biodiversity data portals used by researchers, educators, and the general public. This will facilitate and support many aspects of biological research and education, including species discovery and identification, pest management, ecology and biogeography. InvertNet will serve as a model, applicable to other kinds of biological collections, for the use of efficient, computer-assisted procedures to increase the speed and accuracy of collection data capture. This award is made as part of the National Resource for Digitization of Biological Collections through the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program and all data resulting from this award will be available through the national resource.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Intellectual Merit
The main goals of the InvertNet Thematic Collection Network were to build a set of cost-effective tools and methods for mass digitization of invertebrate (primarily insect) collections and use these to capture images of specimens and associated data labels from collections housed at 22 midwestern institutions. The project aimed to facilitate efficient digitization of entire collections consisting of whole drawers of pinned insect specimens, specimens stored in vials of ethanol, and specimens mounted on microscope slides. This work was needed because traditional methods of capturing specimen data from insect collections are slow and require excessive handling of specimens that often results in specimen damage. For vials and slides, the project adapted a method using commercial high-resolution flatbed scanners to capture images of multiple slides or vials simultaneously. For whole drawers of pinned insects a robotic system was developed that facilitated capture of high-resolution color photos of small sections of each drawer and then stitching these individual photos together into a zoomable, gigapixel-scale panorama of the whole drawer from top-down, and tilted right, left, front and back perspectives. The resulting images allow fine details of individual specimens to be examined and reveal more of the data on labels attached to pins below the specimens than would be visible in a strictly top down perspective. Fourteen such robotic drawer digitization systems were built at the lead institution and distributed to collaborators at the 13 institutions that received separate funding from NSF to support digitization of their own collections. To date the project website has exposed more than 130,000 images representing approximately 7.2 million biological specimens (primarily insects, mites and crustaceans) housed at collaborating institutions.
Broader Impacts
Although digitization work at collaborating InvertNet institutions is ongoing and many potential scientific impacts of the project remain to be realized, the main broader impacts of the project so far consist of contributions to scientific training and infrastructure. The project provided training opportunities for more than 60 graduate and undergraduate students in entomology and computer science with most of these students continuing in science and engineering fields and a significant proportion representing traditionally underrepresented groups. Contributions to scientific infrastructure include the development and implementation of hardware and software systems for efficient collection digitization and a cyberinfrastructure platform that now houses images of several million individual insect specimens. Although data from the specimen images have yet to be fully mobilized by capturing individual text data elements, by providing internet access to specimens housed in major research collections, the project has already provided improved access to a major source of "dark" natural history data, previously unavailable to the broader scientific community and the general public.
Last Modified: 09/27/2017
Modified by: Christopher H Dietrich
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