For the 2026 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Conference, to be held Sep 21-25 in Oslo (Norway), we are organizing the following symposium:
“From Mobilizing Data to AI-Ready Knowledge: Infrastructure for Multimodal Biodiversity Data” (SYM25)

The organizers are Rob Guralnick (U. Florida), Hilmar Lapp (Neuromatch Inc.), Kelsey Huelsman (ERT, NASA), Eric Sokol (NEON, Battelle), and David Bloom (VertNet, UNC Greensboro).
The symposium is motivated by the recognition that even as biodiversity data become increasingly multimodal and AI-driven analyses more common, major challenges nonetheless remain, especially in transforming fragmented observational records, images, sensor streams, and metadata into interoperable, research-ready knowledge. The symposium aims to explore how standards, ontology integration, uncertainty representation, and human–AI collaboration can support provenance-aware, fitness-for-use biodiversity data pipelines.
Full symposium abstract: https://www.tdwg.org/conferences/2026/program/sessions-list/#sym25
We greatly welcome submissions from the EvolDir community, in particular on addressing how community-aligned infrastructure and governance frameworks can enable AI-enabled research while respecting provider expectations and improving data quality, interoperability, and reproducibility. 
The abstract submission deadline is approaching fast on May 20 (AoE).
Instructions for abstract submission: https://www.tdwg.org/conferences/2026/submissions/abstract-instructions/
Hilmar Lapp,
On behalf of the organizers.

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