[MUSIC] Welcome to the course on Ecosystem Services. My name is Martin Schlaepfer and I'm a Senior Lecturer at the University of Geneva, where I teach a graduate course on Ecosystem Services. The primary purpose of this first introductory video is just to make sure you're at the right place and taking the right course. We want to make sure that what we have to offer matches roughly with your expectations. And we also want to outline roughly what we think you need to be able to commit in terms of time commitment in order to complete the course. So let me first begin by saying briefly how I arrived at becoming interested in this concept of ecosystem services. I was trained as a conservation biologist, and at some point in my career, I was working in a remote town of Arizona. Working on the shape of tadpole tails, and the response to novel predators. And I must have been around the measurement of my 10,000th tadpole tail when suddenly I had this realization that I had gotten pretty far from some of my basic interests, which were, how do I make nature more relevant to the economy and to society. And so since then, I have been spending a lot of time thinking and working in this field of ecosystem services. You may ask, is the time even right for a course in ecosystem services given that the field is young, is changing rapidly and is far from being stabilized? What we hope to convey in this course is that a lot of ideas have come to maturity in the last few years, a lot of institutions have been put into place, a lot of international initiatives are now ongoing. And we think the time is right for a fairly advanced course where you can quickly acquire enough basics so that you too can start to contribute to this field. So what is this course about? This course is essentially about three things. On one hand, we have our natural capital, which includes biodiversity and nature. And some ecological functions that come from this natural capital produce what we call Ecosystem Services. Ecosystem services are basically goods that contribute to our human well being. But not just any human well being, we are specifically talking about a sustainable and equitable well-being. So it's important to understand that this field is fairly value laden that we're trying to push the world down a pathway that is better for many people that is so called more sustainable. So let's basically start by trying to answer some of your more pressing questions. Who is this course for? We envision this course is not for beginners. We expect that you've at least heard of the term ecosystem services and you know at least what some basic services are. If that's not the case, we encourage you to consult one of the links below, where there's, for example, a link to a MOOC that was produced by the Natural Capital Project at Stanford, which is a good introduction. There also are some good introductory documents, which we encourage you to read, just to make sure that you're at the right level. Finally, we expect you to be people who are also committed on a personal level, to making this world a better place. because this is really a lot of what the concept is all about. So we will have five basic instructors, but we'll also be calling upon a lot of international experts from different fields who sometimes will be presenting divergent, contrasting views. We hope that, ultimately, all these things will come together and help you have a critical view of the concept so that you too can judge what is relevant, what is not as the field continues to develop. How is this course organized?. You'll see that each module follows a similar structure. We'll begin with a few theoretical concepts given by professors which will be followed by some case studies or some concrete examples. And then we'll have some interviews that are led by Professor and we'll call the Tony's interviews, which will give you access to some high level world specialists. And finally, there'll be a quiz and some additional resources at the end where we can wrap things up in the entire course. How much time will you expect to have to spend on this course? We expect roughly that you’ll have to spend between two and five hours per module. And there are five modules, so it’ll be somewhere between 10 and 25 hours. That may seem like a fairly large discrepancy, but we realize that you’ll be consuming this video at different ways depending on your interest. Some of you will probably just view the videos fairly quickly, take the quiz and be done with it. Other people will want to read the suggested readings and really get a grasp of specific subjects, which of course will take more time. How will I be evaluated? Well, the evaluation is going to match these different types of users in the course that we anticipate. We expect that you will be able to pass the course and obtain the certificate if you view all the videos. And take the quiz right behind that. You'll at least have sufficient points to get a passing grade. But we will also include in the evaluation some more advanced and complex questions to reward if you will the people who have made the extra effort to do some of the readings. Okay, so this wraps up our first segment. We will begin the course itself in a somewhat unusual way. We'll be playing a game. [MUSIC]
