Experts are using artificial intelligence to create a massive digital museum containing millions of specimens from collections held across the UK, and say the project could “make a huge shift” in our understanding of the natural world.
People will eventually be able to view, on their phones and computers, about 70 million samples of animals, plants, fossils and rocks.
Robots and artificial intelligence technologies are being used to scan and analyze samples, some of which date back centuries, which accelerates the process of digitizing these collections, shortening a period that would have taken hundreds of years to a single decade.
The new digital museum will allow researchers to understand how the UK has changed over the entire history of our planet, and predict future changes to climate, food supplies and species declines.
This project will also be available to the public, so they can view and enjoy it, says Joanna Dunster, deputy director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of the UK Research and Innovation Agency that is funding the project.
She told the BBC: "I'm looking forward to exploring this project with my four-year-old son, who doesn't know much about science, but is very enthusiastic."
It is already possible to search for some specimens in the database, but they represent only a small part of the country's collections, and most of them are held by a limited number of major institutions, such as the Natural History Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
The new funding will encourage institutions across the UK to make millions more plant, animal and fossil specimens available and included in the project.
“We need to make these collections openly available, rather than having them remain in often inaccessible places,” Dunster said.
The public and researchers will be able to see the full diversity of the natural world, from unusual specimens, such as a blind three-legged fish supporting itself on the sea floor, to historical specimens, such as a horse tooth recovered by Charles Darwin in 1833 from northeastern Argentina.
The project is known as Distributed System for Scientific Collections (DiSSCo UK) and is overseen by the Natural History Museum.
Scanning samples is not a simple task. Not only does each sample have to be photographed, but small labels containing important scientific information about it must also be recorded, which are often handwritten, some of which may date back centuries.
According to the team responsible for the project, implementing this task manually would have taken hundreds of years, but the use of robots and artificial intelligence now allows this process to be completed within one decade, according to Sarah Adizio, director of program implementation.
“What we can do now is link and analyze this information on an unprecedented scale, something that was not possible before,” she said.
100 museums, botanical gardens, universities and other institutions are participating in the project.
The specimens that will be placed under the cameras will not be large creatures, as there are no whales or dinosaurs in the opening stage, which begins in Wales and Scotland.
The process will begin by recording and digitizing dried and compressed species of beetles, butterflies, moths, flies, flowers and ferns, which are smaller and less glamorous, but actually provide the best record of changes in the surrounding environment in the country.
In Cardiff, the team will record nearly half a million insect and plant specimens, from large, eye-catching butterflies to tiny flies that could be lost on the tip of a finger, proving to be among the most sensitive indicators of an ecosystem's health.
In Scotland, the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh and the National Museums of Scotland together hold 13 million specimens, making them the second largest natural science collection in the United Kingdom.
Together with 50 smaller Scottish collections, these collections extend from sea level to mountaintops, covering two centuries of changes to plants and insects of all kinds in all forms of Scotland's natural environments.
Jenny Girone, head of natural sciences and research at Amgodva Cymru Museum Wales, said the project would represent an opportunity to showcase materials from across the country.
"Every collection is unique. We have a lot of material in Wales that doesn't exist anywhere else," she added.
She told the BBC: "Just as collecting material from across the UK allows us to get a good picture of what's happening across the whole country, each body contributing its own collections from around the world will allow us to get a much stronger picture of what's happening elsewhere."
Each specimen preserved in a museum represents an image of a moment from the past.
Much of natural history is an investigative process, piecing together evidence from tens of millions of puzzle pieces to recreate a vivid, accurate, and detailed picture of how our world has changed.
The new initiative will make this task much easier, by bringing together millions of samples, along with powerful artificial intelligence tools that allow searching through the information.
