28 October 2026
Text by DiSSCo CSO
This year’s TDWG conference in Oslo counted with a numerous group of participants from DiSSCo. Below is a summary of the main sessions in which DiSSCo or DiSSCo-related topics were discussed.
Session type
Symposium
Organisers
Giuditta Parolini, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin – Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany; Eva Alonso Vizcaino, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands
Biodiversity science data infrastructures face growing threats, including cyberattacks, AI-driven data scraping, loss of expertise, funding cuts, political restrictions on data access, and environmental hazards. These challenges particularly affect biodiversity research, which depends on a diverse network of repositories worldwide, many of which are vulnerable to operational, financial, and governance issues.
The symposium aimed to explore how biodiversity science organisations can strengthen the resilience of their data infrastructures and develop effective risk mitigation strategies. It was an open, integrative session inviting contributions from academic institutions, conservation organisations, citizen science projects, and other stakeholders to share a wide array of technical and non-technical experiences (e.g. governance, communication, training), approaches, and solutions.
Eva Alonso, head of governance of DiSSCo and one of the organisers of the symposium, talks about governance as a mechanism for RI resilience:
Other DiSSCo colleages participated in the session.
Claus Weiland contributed with the presentation “From Pixels to Policy: Closing the Gap between In Situ Monitoring, Earth Observation, and Policy Actionability”, and Mareike Petersen presented “Resilience of RIs through Engagement and Training” with Jose Alonso. All the presentations are available in the session’s recording below.
DS19 Strengthening resilience in biodiversity data infrastructures: From practice to global coordination
Session type
Discussion session
Organisers
Sharif Islam, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands; Giuditta Parolini, Museum für Naturkunde, Germany; Eva Alonso, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands; Wouter Addink, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands; Jose Alonso, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands; Sam Leeflang, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands
Recent alignment between DiSSCo and GBIF shows how shared standards (Darwin Core Data Package and DiSSCo’s openDS specification) can enable interoperability without information loss. Specimen-level data can now move more seamlessly across systems when conceptual foundations are aligned. Building on this, a broader question emerges: how can collaboration move beyond bilateral technical integrations toward a truly coordinated biodiversity data ecosystem? Researchers increasingly need to discover and combine diverse data types, yet these remain siloed across specialised infrastructures like DiSSCo, GBIF, BHL, eLTER, ELIXIR, and LifeWatch. Using the DiSSCo-GBIF collaboration as a starting point, this session invited participants from technical, scientific, and policy communities to explore what it would take to enable findability, usability, and interoperability at scale. Where should alignment happen: conceptual models, identifiers, metadata, vocabularies, access mechanisms, or governance? How can infrastructures collaborate without converging into a single data model? And what practical steps can reduce fragmentation for users today?
DiSSCo’s Sharif Islam, one of the organisers of the session, talks on standards, workflows and the digital specimen.
No recordings were made during the discussion.
SYM29 From Cabinets to Clouds – Bridging the gap between collection- and database management
Session type
Symposium
Organisers
Caitlin Thorn, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany; Nora Lentge-Maaß, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany; Frederik Berger, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany; Mareike Petersen, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany; Sabine von Mering, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany
Physical collections and digital databases are often managed by separate collection and data management teams, creating potential challenges in coordinating digitisation workflows and integrating biodiversity data standards. Institutions adopt diverse approaches to collaboration, reflecting differences in organisational structures, expertise, and digital development practices.
The session aimed to bring together experiences and best practices to explore how institutions can improve collaboration, decision-making, and data integration to contribute to global biodiversity knowledge. Topics included coordinating collection and data managers, implementing data standards, combining expertise across domains, and integrating collection management systems with digital databases, including the very important DiSSCo-related concept of virtual collections. Ultimately, the session sought to identify common challenges and effective practices for creating cohesive workflows that connect physical collections with digital data.
Melanie de Leeuw, from DiSSCo’s development team, used her presentation “Accelerating specimen identification through Virtual Collections while promoting collaboration” to introduce the concept of virtual collections.
You can access the recording of the entire session by clicking on the button below.
WM48 TDWG Image Quality and AI-Readiness (IQAIR) Task Group Working Meeting: Image Quality and AI-Readiness Metadata for Biodiversity Media
Session type
Working meeting
Organisers
Yasin Bakış, Tulane University, United States; Henry Bart, Tulane University, United States
The TDWG Image Quality and AI-Readiness (IQAIR) Task Group aims to develop standardized metadata concepts and vocabulary to describe biodiversity media and support automated processing and AI-based analysis.
This working meeting of the IQAIR group brought together task group members and other participants to review proposed metadata terms, assess their alignment with existing TDWG standards such as Audiovisual Core and Darwin Core, and explore applications including automated trait extraction, image analysis, and machine-generated annotations. Discussions addressed practical implementation challenges, such as integrating image quality descriptors and machine-actionable annotations into repositories and data infrastructures.
DiSSCo’s Wouter Addink contributed to the meeting with the presentation “Unifying Biodiversity Images: Content-based Identification with the ISCC standard (ISO 24138:2024)”
Our own Wouter Addink has indeed brought DiSSCo to several sessions in TDWG 2026, including the Annotation Validation Framework for DiSSCo.
You can access the recording of the entire WM48 session by clicking on the button below.
SYM38 Sustaining the Geo-Biodiversity Data Ecosystem: Standards-Driven Approaches to Long-Term Resilience
Session type
Symposium
Organisers
Libby Ellwood, iDigBio, United States; James Macklin, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Canada; Jutta Buschbom, Statistical Genetics, Germany; Kerstin Lehnert, Columbia University, United States; Andrew Bentley, University of Kansas, United States; Ely Wallis, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia; Pamela Soltis, University of Florida, United States; José Fortes, University of Florida, United States
Geo- and biodiversity sciences have undergone major transformations through digitisation, data mobilisation, and interlinking, leading to initiatives such as the Digital Extended Specimen concept and the development of global Research Infrastructures. However, sustaining these systems presents challenges, including funding continuity, data and software quality, governance, collaboration, and workforce development. This symposium explores geo- and biodiversity data infrastructures as interconnected socio-technical systems, emphasising the role of standards and FAIR-compliant data in enabling coordination across providers, repositories, platforms, and users. It aims to discuss how collaborative approaches and research- and machine-ready standards can strengthen infrastructure sustainability, improve governance, reduce duplication, support workforce development, and create broader impact beyond the scientific domains.
You can access the full recording of the session by clicking on the button below.
SYM13 Responsible AI, Open Digital Curation, and Round-Tripping for Biodiversity Data
Session type
Symposium
Organisers
Deborah Paul, Species File Group, Prairie Research Institute, University of Illinois, United States; Siobhan Leachman, Landcare Research group of the New Zealand Bioeconomy Science Institute, New Zealand; Sabine von Mering, Museum für Naturkunde, Germany
The session explored open digital curation as a continuous, inclusive process throughout the biodiversity data lifecycle, focusing on the responsible integration of human expertise and AI-assisted data enrichment. It highlighted the importance of transparent, attributable, versioned, and reusable annotations and enhancements, as well as round-tripping these contributions back into source systems to ensure interoperability and maintain curatorial authority.
Through case studies and methods involving natural history collections, specimens, images, and genomic resources, the session addressed challenges such as scaling AI-enabled curation, validating and crediting contributions, aligning with standards like Darwin Core, and developing accessible workflows that support collaboration among collection staff, researchers, and external contributors.
DiSSCo’s Wouter Addink contributed to the discussion with the presentation “Closing the Loop: The DiSSCo Annotation Validation Framework for Trustworthy Data Round-tripping”
You can access the recording of the session SYM13 in full by clicking on the button below.
LT17 Bots, Bits, and Biodiversity
Session type
Lightning talks
Organisers
Jack Hollister, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom; Sanson Poon, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom; Arianna Salili-James, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom; Qianqian Gu, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom
This session consisted of a series of short, rapid presentations on robotic and automated approaches to biodiversity data acquisition. It focused on the design and use of physical and hybrid systems that generate structured, machine-actionable datasets and their alignment with TDWG Biodiversity Information Standards.
Our colleague Soulaine Theocharides, software developer at DiSSCo, gave a talk about machine annotation with the title “Robots Rapidly Writing Records: Machine Annotations at Scale with DiSSCo”. In the video below she reminds the modular nature of a RI like DiSSCo.
Do you want to know more about the technical side of DiSSCo? DiSSCo puts different technical knowledge platforms at the scientific community’s disposal:
DiSSCoTech: Get the latest technical posts about the design of DiSSCo’s Infrastructure
DiSSCo GitHub: Code hosting for DiSSCo software, version control and collaboration
DiSSCo Modelling Framework: A WikiBase tool that is configured to create an abstraction of the DiSSCo data model