St Peter’s graduate wins Royal Geographic Society Quantitative Methods Research Group (QMRG) Undergraduate Dissertation Prize

Recent St Peter’s graduate Jacobus Petersen (Geography, 2020) has been named the winner of the Royal Geographical Society’s Quantitative Methods Research Group (QMRG) 2023 Undergraduate Dissertation Prize for his undergraduate dissertation, Tropical pollination networks in their physical environment: a study into the influence of plant functional traits on the resilience of a crucial ecosystem service.

Each year, the Quantitative Methods Research Group (QMRG) offers a prize for the best UK undergraduate dissertation that engages with quantitative methods and methodologies. Jacobus’s biogeographical study of pollination networks in tropical ecosystems compiled and compared datasets describing different pollinator and plant species interactions. His quantitative analysis of the data demonstrated the risks climate change poses to tropical ecosystems.

Jacobus said, ‘I am very grateful for all the help I have had from my tutors at St Peter’s and my dissertation supervisor, Jesús Aguirre Gutiérrez. Through their teaching and mentorship, they inspired me to pursue my interests in biogeography further and use new methods to explore the opportunity presented by large environmental datasets.’

Jacobus graduated from the University of Oxford with his BA in Geography in 2023 and has remained in Oxford to pursue an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management. He continues to focus his research on biogeographical data, now with an interest in biodiversity impacts within the carbon market.