BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University alumnus Jeffrey Klemens is, in many ways, a translator. Not only does the 1998 biology graduate help coordinate and translate during an annual May Term course to Costa Rica, he also is the president of a conservation organization that helps researchers from different fields understand each other’s work.
“Researchers are a highly independent group,” said Klemens, who founded Investigadores del Área de Conservación Guanacaste (iACG) several years ago with the aim of helping to coordinate research work done in the Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a national park in the northwest part of Costa Rica. “All of us speak our own language, and it’s the language of highly technical academic publications. It’s currently very difficult for conservation managers who want to extract information from the primary literature to do so, unless they’ve had fairly extensive scientific training.” Enter iACG, a Web site and database helping researchers working in the ACG. “I hope iACG can serve as a bridge between the community of researchers who work in the ACG and the rest of the park,” said Klemens.
Klemens’ interest in travel stems from his time at Illinois Wesleyan, where he took field courses that took him to Guyana in South America and to Australia. He first journeyed to Costa Rica in 1998 before beginning his doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania under world-renowned tropical ecologist Dan Jansen. “On that trip I conducted a study that was an extension of what I had been doing at IWU with migratory birds and pesticides,” said Klemens, who published his work along with Illinois Wesleyan Professor of Biology Given Harper, Professor of Chemistry and Associate Provost Jeff Frick, and several Illinois Wesleyan undergraduates, who conducted the lab work on campus.