Researcher Spotlight

Carmen Ugarte

Carmen is a Research Specialist, Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Biology at NRES. Her research focuses on understanding the effects of soil management practices on soil quality and function. She is especially interested in studying the dynamics of soil food webs and their influence on soil ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and the regulation of population densities of deleterious soil organisms. Her work includes basic and applied research at different scales in the regional and national levels in agronomic and natural systems.

What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository? Is there anything else you would like to share?

As we strive to increase the transparency and reproducibility of our findings, data sharing is becoming the norm in the scientific community. By using the Illinois Data Bank to curate and safely archive my datasets, I am able to make my datasets publicly and readily available, and researchers can use it for multiple applications within the discipline.

The learning experience that one gets during the curation process enables researchers to build more comprehensive metadata structures and improved data management plans that may influence how we collect and share data in the future.