Officials at Kansas University’s Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center say they’re about to make ecological research a lot easier.

The museum has received about $3 million of a $12.25 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop computer software that will link Web sites and databases to one central site for data.

The Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) program continues the museum’s efforts to link museum collections via the Internet for researchers.

“It’ll allow people to ask new kinds of questions easily that you had to be a computer geek to ask in the past,” said Jim Beach, the museum’s assistant director for informatics.

Beach gave this example: If a researcher wanted to learn the relationship between the health of a fish population and the chemistry of the water in which it lives, he would need information from several sources.

Those might include ecological studies from government agencies, population samples from museums and studies from nonprofit groups. The SEEK program’s goal is to provide a site to serve as a one-stop source for that information.

“Right now we can access this data one at a time,” Beach said. “What I can’t do is do all that at once.”

KU officials will work with researchers at the University of California-San Diego, the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of New Mexico, to develop the software. The grant is for five years.