The University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility (UTCT) was established in 1997 to make HRXCT - a direct descendant of medical CT - available to researchers in the natural sciences. Through this award, oUTCT will partner with the oVert (openVertebrate) project to make nearly nine terabytes of existing high-resolution X-ray computed tomographic (HRXCT) data publicly accessible, and to train the next generation of students in best practices for these data. Scientists from around the world have brought their most important and precious natural history specimens to UTCT to image and measure their interior features nondestructively. This application of HRXCT technology has been tremendously successful, resulting in the proliferation of scanners at institutions across the country. Over the course of two years, oUTCT will upload HRXCT data for 90 UTCT clients to MorphoSource. About 3000 specimen scans, representing nearly 1,500 fossil and extant vertebrate species, will be made available so they can be easily discovered and downloaded by everyone from scientists to artists to K-12 educators. This mobilization will be accomplished by undergraduate students employed at UTCT, who will learn the basics of HRXCT data acquisition and visualization as well as basic bioinformatics.
The UTCT datasets, acquired in part via dozens of NSF grants and cited more than 18,000 times in academic publications, remain in high demand due to their broad scope, high data quality, and historical significance. This demand has been fueled in part by the public-facing Digital Library of Morphology (DigiMorph.org), an NSF-funded project online since 2002 and housed at UTCT, which serves HRXCT-derived animations for more than 1,000 biological and paleontological specimens. In the oUTCT project, UTCT and DigiMorph will partner with oVert and iDigBio, both at the University of Florida, and the MorphoSource data repository at Duke University to make this unparalleled collection of HRXCT datasets more readily discoverable and more easily repurposed. As part of the educational outreach for this project, oUTCT will also provide training to the oVert community, which spans nearly 20 universities and academic institutions, to maximize the scientific impact of that project. The UTCT will host two short courses per year, cosponsored by oVert and iDigBio, to train students and scientists associated with oVert and MorphoSource in the fundamentals of HRXCT data acquisition, visualization, analysis, and long-term management. These activities will expand the impact of the original oVert project and maximize the return on NSF?s investment in it, UTCT, DigiMorph, iDigBio, and MorphoSource.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
