Maricela joined CAS as a geology curatorial assistant in 2017. From 2020-2022, she was a research assistant on the complex adaptive socio-economic systems (CASES) project and in the summer of 2022 she was a fellow with the Environmental Data Initiative working to mobilize data for the Journey North citizen science program. She has since returned to her curatorial duties where one of her major responsibilities is digitizing and standardizing biodiversity records, which allows these rich data sources that describe the history of life on Earth to be shared with the public and scientific community for education, outreach, and research. She has supported digitization for the EPICC TCN in the past and is currently involved in retooling legacy databases to facilitate sharing biodiversity data with the public via aggregators like GBIF, iDigBio, and Bionomia through the adoption of community data standards. She enjoys curating and maintaining the paleo collections to balance her computer time, and is interested in biodiversity informatics, data visualization (see CAS collections visualizations here), ecosystem dynamics, data ethics, and advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in academic spaces. She holds a B.A. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Invertebrate Zoology and Geology
mabarca@calacademy.org