. >> emily hartop has gone through over 35 thousand samples looking for new flies. >> we're looking at the morphology... what we start with is just looking at a whole bunch of flies together and saying "well, this one looks different than this one, and this one looks different from this one" and then as you begin to refine that, you take notes on specific characters, you take measurements, you take photographs and you get more specific from there. >> flies might be in focus for bioscanners but the research potential for this collection is nothing to swat away. >> understanding biodiversity right here is tremendously important for this city. >> dean pentcheff is bioscan's project coordinator. he is leading the charge to keep hundreds of thousands of insect specimens organized. >> it's the biodiversity here that fuels the ecosystem services, like oxygen generation, waste management, things like that that keep this city going. but we know full well there is much more to be had from these samples than we are going to take from them. >> this is just the beginning of the research endeavor. >