Room setup

Organizers and speakers test screen-sharing and microphones. Headsets for all are encouraged and result in best / better sound quality.

Welcome

• Matt Yoder
• Deborah Paul

Discover in our welcome more about the scale, scope, and activities you'll experience at TWT2026.

Community Highlights 1 - Our Community Drives the Evolution of TaxonWorks

Hear directly from those using TaxonWorks. How did their needs impact what TaxonWorks is now? Get insights from the nuances, culture change perspectives, joys, and frustrations they share. Concludes with round-table Q/A.

• Ana JešovnikMammals, insects, research and teaching collections data-captured in one database
• TBD 1 (beetles?)TBD 2
• TBD 1 (ants?)TBD 2
• Maria Marta CiglianoOrthoptera Species File - From 100 to 1MY - Research/maps project Facilitates and Drives Innovation
• John AbbottOdonata - Names integration with the GeoEOD project

☕ Break

Roundtable I - Global Aggregators and Aggregations in Biodiversity Informatics: Balancing Community Within the Onslaught of AI

• Leen Vanderpitte, Rob Guralnick, Rod Page, Colleen Funkhouser, Olaf Banki

Each of our roundtable members have influenced ways for how we think about Biodiversity Informatics, lead globally recognized programs, and they are, no doubt, burning a lot of energy thinking about AI. This session specifically looks at what Community means within the tidal-wave of "AI". If everything is free and open, and AI facilates individuals to act like they are a team, what then Community? How do Communities adapt and alocate their time given the omnipresence of AI? This is free-flowing opportunity to predict, fret, panic and shout with joy on the topic.

Taxon Pages Update

• José Pereira, Matt Yoder

See live examples in use and learn more about new capabilities and upcoming features possible using our TaxonPages software to share data in any Project using TaxonWorks software as their database.

GBIF Hosted Community Portals Lightning Intro and Roundtable

• Morten Høfft, Matt Yoder, Hernán Pereira, José Pereira

After a quick introduction to GBIF Hosted Data Portals, we join in a conversation as to how this effort parallels TaxonPages. Can we share code, create an ecosystem of community-built and curated panels (elements of a taxon page) that work in both worlds? What tools and frameworks do both projects use, and how might these overlap? Where can potential users find out more? What are the biodiversity informatics services that share data we might integrate in TaxonPages and Community Portals? Can you host on your own?

Lunch

Workshop - Taxa and their names: Experience, hands-on, SFG tools involved in curating the nomenclature of our Earth's species

A new experimental format for TaxonWorks Together in 2026! Participate in a small series of guided hands-on exercises. Each exercise highlights functionality built or facilitated by an SFG team member. From Global Names, to Catalogue of Life, to TaxonWorks, particate in an innovative(?) multi-breakout room format that lets you focus and engage on the topics that interest you through short guided exercises. Find names in documents, experience cross-platform name matching, look up synonyms, experience name curation in TaxonWorks, and much more. Come together in a wrap-up to connect-the-dots in a discussion of how your workflows may evolve. Some elements may require pre-workshop preparation, check back frequently for more.

End day 1

Room setup

Organizers and speakers test screen-sharing and microphones. Headsets for all are encouraged and result in best / better sound quality.

Introduction to Day 2

Welcome and overview of today's topics

Getting to Know Community Consults

• Deborah Paul

Learn about how our community engages and uses processes like unconferences to drive how our meetings run and how our community conversations evolve.

Processes as a central challenge to Biodiversity Informatics - A Perspective from the Crayfish Community

• Bronwyn Williams
• Megan McCuller

Learning from community members engaging directly in combining efforts of those who survey with those who collect and using TaxonWorks to manage and explore their collective data.

What's New to TaxonWorks - I

• Matt Yoder

With reference to the prior Perspective, TaxonWorks users as fellow commentators, and digressions on the needs of Surveys and Collections, we highlight features and thinking new to TaxonWorks this year.

Syncing Taxonomy at a Global Scale Across System Aggregators

• Dmitry Dmitriev

If you lead the curation of a dataset recognized as being globally authoratative, what does it mean to keep it up-to-date given related data found in other global aggregators? Where does circularity come in to play? Given taxonomic names as an index to information, how much additional work emerges when aggregators draw names from multiple sources, including those you curate?

☕ Break

TENTATIVE: geoBoundries - Updates and Discussion

A followup to our previous TWT discussion with Dan on geoBoundaries and its potential use in TaxonWorks. Discussion of where we are at in the exploration of TaxonWorks potentially using geoBoundaries.

Plant Bug Taxonomy in TaxonWorks: Milestones from Past to Present, and future Data Capture

• Plant Bug Team

Hear how NSF funded the Plant Bug Community and SFG to migrate a long running Smithosonian-based project on the Plant Bugs to SFG and TaxonWorks. Now that it is migrated what does the community look like, and where is it headed?

Taxon/Project Highlights

• TBD

Roundtable II - Genomes, eDNA, Barcodes: Should TaxonWorks Engage DNA, if so, How and When?

TaxonWorks hit a major milestone this year completing the implentation of all data-models conceived at its origin. 2026 offers a chance to plot the next chapter- should it expand, and how? With guests presenting 3-minute 1 slide challenges we'll discuss where in general communities are looking for support and tooling, and what DNA in TaxonWorks might look like.

Lunch

Ento-Bento: Customizing and Facilitating TaxonWorks Training in Collaboration

• Tommy McElrath

Hear from the first private enterprise supporting growth of TaxonWorks Community. Bringing expertise and community together across domains to faciliate using TaxonWorks to build community and rich data resources for collections and research.

Does It Do That? Should It? An Unconference on TaxonWorks

• SFG Developers
• TaxonWorks Users
• You

Lots of opportunity for open conversation in general. A participant-prioritzed exploration of TaxonWorks features and functionality, unconference style. A chance to get at new features not covered elsewhere, and more.

Review, Wrap, Preview Tomorrow

End of Day 2 - Almost!

TaxonWorks Late Nite - AI x Viz Show and Tell

Played with AI X Data Viz? Come chill and share-your-screen. Art, or Science, let us know what you've played with and how.

Real End of Day 2

Room setup

Organizers and speakers test screen-sharing and microphones. Headsets for all are encouraged and result in best / better sound quality.

Day 3 Introduction

AI Facilitated Data-capture Workflows in Natural History Collections

• Nick Dowdy

Hear about speach driven data-capture in a Natural History Collection.

Roundtable III - AI that Inspires Us: Real World Examples And Discussion

• Nick Dowdy
• Deborah Paul
• TBA

Join Nick, Debbie, and others in an open discussion of how AI has been used within Collections and Natural-History Research.

☕ Break

AI Show and Tell From TaxonWorks Adopters

Find out what has happened and what's in the works. Discover what AI has made possible in collaboration with our community members and our Species File Group.

• Davide Dal PosMaking Innovation Happen for the World Ichnemonidae Database and Community
• Josh PletcherHopping On: Getting Flea Taxonomy Into The Open Source TaxonWorks Ecosystem With AI And Community Support
• Robert Luke Kresslein, Jessica AwadThe host in the machine (learning algorithm): Parasitoid wasps are highly abundant, megadiverse, and essential to ecosystem function, especially in terms of regulating populations of other organisms in both natural and agricultural settings. However, for most species, their host associations and host repertoire remain unknown. This significant gap in our knowledge is a major barrier to effective insect conservation and to harnessing the full range of ecosystem services. Valuable ecological data remains locked in zoological literature, but the high number of publications and analog origins make them difficult to access, synergize, and compare to putative novel associations. The Universal Chalcidoidea Database in TaxonWorks presents an ideal test case for a new text mining protocol to efficiently extract host-parasitoid relationships from historical literature using commercially available large language models (LLMs). We present a pipeline to perform OCR on published literature, extract ecological data, and parse the data into darwincore format.

What's Next? Scoping and Prioritizing Development for 2026-2027

To increase transparency and better communicate what TaxonWorks Developers are focusing on we implemented an issue prioritization list this past year. The process was very successful, with the list being periodically reviewed throughout the year. Join with us to discuss and populate an early draft of the 2026-2027 prioritization list in real time. Adding your issue prior to this session will greatly increase the probability it makes it into the discussion here!

Lunch

Buisiness Meeting

• Matt Yoder

The details that make it possible for the Species File group to bring you our software suite and our community empowerment. Hear important news and thinking that will impact the future of TaxonWorks and SFG hosted projects. It is very highly recommended that Project Administrators attend. Open Q/A to follow.

Review, Wrap

End of Day 3 and TaxonWorks Together 2026