A three-dimensional look at 56 million insect and insect relative specimens — along with a searchable database — will go online in coming months, with the University of Illinois as the lead partner.

The digital museum will benefit expert and amateur alike, a lead researcher says.

The insect project is one of three new ones at the Prairie Research Institutes' scientific surveys, which will also involve engineers and computer specialists from across the Urbana-Champaign campus.

The UI is getting $2.6 million of the National Science Foundation's $10 million for creating a national resource of digital data using existing biological collections.

The online museum will feature life forms that had often been filed into case drawers, and will offer accessibility to records of the biodiversity on this planet, the NSF said.

The lion's share of the UI money will go to entomologist Christopher Dietrich's "InvertNet — An Integrative Platform for Research on Environmental Change, Species Discovery and Identification."

The total project is for $5 million, $2.3 million of which goes to Urbana.

There are 13 other collaborating universities in Dietrich's project.

Other projects with the Natural History Survey include mycologist Andrew Miller's leadership of "North American Lichens and Bryophytes: Sensitive Indicators of Environmental Quality and Change," which received $4.2 million, with $105,000 for Urbana.

Sixteen other institutions are collaborators.

This project, which Miller notes will not be 3-D due to the flatness of most of the specimens, will offer digital images of more than 2.3 million North American lichen and bryophyte specimens from more than 60 collections.

The third project, for which entomologist Dmitry Dmitriev and botanist Rick Phillippe received contracts of $100,000 and $55,000, respectively, is a digitization project led by the American Museum of Natural History entitled "Plants, Herbivores and Parasitoids: A Model System for the Study of Tri-Trophic Associations."

All the awards are for a four-year period.

Dietrich said InvertNet's data from 22 Midwestern institutional collections with up to 10 million specimens each could help us see the effects of land use changes on living things in the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi River drainage basins.

"NSF's basic goal is to digitize a billion specimens from North America," Dietrich said. "This will be something we've never been able to do before. For decades, we've had insects in drawers, pinned, covered with glass, and on the pin a small label."

All over that information will be soon on the Internet.

"You'll be able to go to the website and tilt a drawer from side to side, zooming in on some details," he said.

Information will be searchable and include where the specimens were collected and what the habitat was like — and even who the collector was.

"The program is labor-intensive. A lot of people have been trying to digitize collections ever since we've had computers. Only recently, we've had improvements so we can automate the process to some extent," he said.

The work started July 1.

Miller said he's been using the grant for digitizing lichen to hire the people who will have the task of taking the photos and cataloging them.

"We're doing 2.3 million specimens across the nation," Miller said.

The Prairie Research Institute includes the Illinois Natural History Survey, Illinois State Archaeological Survey, Illinois State Geological Survey, Illinois State Water Survey and Illinois Sustainable Technology Center.