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Address from the TDWG Chair: highlights of the year and TDWG at a crossroads
TDWG has had a productive year, but a growing, more diverse community and the rise of AI put it at a crossroads that needs more volunteers, better documentation and more sustainable maintenance and funding.
David Bloom ↗
LT17 closing Q&A: AI hallucinations, validation and lightning-talk format
Validation of large-scale AI output remains open; for ML classifiers, accuracy should be judged on the ecological task rather than benchmark metrics.
Jack Hollister, Haris, Tanya Berger-Wolf ↗
The future is the future - thought about access to data in publications
Liberating data from literature works, but the future lies in use-case-driven, digital-first publishing that also targets the undescribed majority of species.
Donat Agosti ↗
Strengthening Taxonomic capacity and Biodiversity Information in Education
Taxonomy and biodiversity informatics need to be visible, modern parts of curricula, and TDWG should revive its curriculum interest group to secure training and knowledge transfer.
Patricia Mergen ↗
TDWG 2026 Unconference: pitches, topic voting and breakout report-backs
The Unconference showed the community's priorities (controlled vocabularies, AI readiness, project sustainability, Wikidata, Darwin Core data packages) and started several follow-up groups.
Javier Molina, Nicky Nicolson, Deb Paul ↗
TDWG Business Meeting: elections, subcommittee and working group reports, and TDWG 2027 announcement
TDWG is recruiting for key elected roles and subcommittees while reporting a busy standards year and announcing a large joint 2027 meeting in Montreal.
David Bloom, Ben Norton, Kit Lewers ↗
TDWG Treasurer's Report: financial policies and investment proposals
TDWG is financially stable but not growing its membership; the treasurer proposes codified policies, an endowment and investments to fund outreach and sustainability.
Chandra Earl ↗