MBiol Student
jonas.nohturfft@bnc.ox.ac.uk

Jonas Nohturfft

Background

Whether chasing after birds clutching my binoculars, or on my hand and knees in tall grass flicking through a wildflower field guide, understanding and appreciating nature has taken up a large portion of my time and thought since before I can remember. Visiting family around the world has exposed me to tangled landscapes of birds, beasts, and plants in Europe and the Americas that I have eagerly explored on foot and on my plate. Growing up both in a rural area and as an immigrant, with the compulsion to absorb the different intersecting languages, cuisines, and histories in my life, has immersed me in the powerful, reciprocal relationship between human cultures and the natural world.

Identifying, observing, and learning about birds and all wild and cultivated plants is my greatest passion. It is this that lead me to biology and brings me further to wanting to help ensure that both humans and nature can thrive in the future.

Research Interests

I want to help towards ensuring both the fair accommodation of growing human populations and a nature-positive future. Within this, I am interested in investigating the impacts of human activities on nature, as well as developing our understanding of how agriculture and other areas of human economy can provide humanity with essential commodities while minimising our footprint on the natural world.

Agricultural plants and systems, as well as the interaction between human cultures and their natural environments more broadly, have always fascinated me. My undergraduate studies brought me to realise how far reaching the impacts of human activities can be on nature, as well as how closely the area of nature on Earth is related to the area of human land use like agriculture. Accurately informing the sustainability of policy, producers’ and distributers’ practices, and consumers’ decisions is one of the keys to a nature-positive future. Focusing on understudied human impacts on nature may be especially useful, which is why I have chosen to investigate the impact of beef farming in Brazil on habitat fragments on farms for my master’s project.

Current Research

From June to August of 2024, I stayed in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, helping to collect data on the environmental impacts of beef farms. The data I collected went towards research at the University of São Paulo and the University of Oxford, including contributing to the HESTIA platform and my own current master’s project.

My research focuses on investigating the relationship between the characteristics of Brazilian beef farms and of the areas of natural habitat they contain. Brazil is one of the world’s leading beef producers, as well as one of the most world’s most biodiverse countries. The region I worked in lies in the transition zone between Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and Cerrado ecoregions, both designated biodiversity hotspots. The Atlantic Forest has suffered the most total habitat destruction of any Brazilian ecoregion, and the Cerrado is the Brazilian ecoregion presently experiencing the highest rate of habitat destruction. In both cases, expanding beef production is a leading driver.

To combat habitat destruction, Brazil’s law number 12.651 requires private landowners to conserve a certain portion of their land as natural vegetation, called a legal reserve. While this environmental legislation is globally leading, it has implications for the fragmentation and degradation of the habitat patches it conserves. I am investigating the area and health of woodland on Brazilian beef farms using remote sensing with satellite data, looking at the relationship between woodland area and health and differences between farms.

Brief CV

Volunteer – RSPB Pulborough Brooks (2018)

Intern (molecular biology) – University of Surrey (2019)

Intern (molecular biology) – St George’s, University of London (2019 & 2020)

Intern – Thames Valley Environmental Records Centre (2022)

Intern (freshwater ecology) – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (2022)

Volunteer (plant field guide development) – Oxford Botanic Garden (2022)

Intern/Collaborator – HESTIA, ICCS, and Universidade de São Paulo (2024)