Bill Adams, Univ. of Cambridge, UK: I am currently Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at the University of Cambridge, where I have taught in the Department of Geography since 1984.  I spent my childhood in suburban London, and always assumed I would grow up to be a naturalist.  But at school I was inspired by a geography teacher who taught me to understand maps, and to think about the ways way people make and change landscapes, so I went to university to study geography.  After graduating, I spent a year trying to be an ornithologist, then did a Masters degree in conservation and got involved in starting the British Association of Nature Conservationists (BANC) before starting a doctorate on the environmental and social impacts of dams in Africa. My PhD changed me from being a sort of ecologist, to a sort of social scientist.  I still feel something of an academic mongrel, and try to bring a multi-disciplinary approach to trying to understand the tensions between conservation and development.  Robert Chambers once wrote that academics get more prestige from writing about failure than success, and I have struggled to outgrow that temptation: both conservation and development abound failures, and success is elusive. My research has mostly focused on the UK and Africa, and I have a particular interest in the way ideas and policies in conservation and development are originated and evolve.  In recent years, I have been involved in projects on conflicts between farmers, elephants and conservationists in Kenya, the politics of landscape scale conservation, and the power of ecosystem services and other metaphors in conservation policy.  In my writing I have tried to carve a space on the borderlands between the academic world and policy and popular debates.  My books include Future Nature (Earthscan 2003) and Against Extinction (Earthscan 2004): I am currently working on a fourth edition of Green Development: environment and sustainability in a developing world (Routledge 2009).  I write a blog with a colleague at http://thinkinglikeahuman.wordpress.com/, and write poetry at http://greenfieldsite.tumblr.com/.

Leon C. Braat (Dr.), Alterra, NL is Senior Researcher International Biodiversity Policy at Alterra, Wageningen-UR, the Netherlands. Between 1975 and 1990, he was associate professor of environmental modelling and ecological-economics at the University of Florida, the Free University Amsterdam, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in Vienna. In this period he published widely and (co-) authored several books. In 1990 he moved to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, where a.o. he was director of the Biodiversity department. Since 2007, at Alterra, he leads international biodiversity and ecosystem service projects on the science – policy interface for the European Commission, the Dutch National Government and the Chinese Government. He participated in the UNEP study on “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” (TEEB), and is involved as senior project leader and advisor in Dutch and European Economic valuation studies. Leon is currently Project leader of European scale DG ENV project “Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services” and in EU Framework 7 projects BESAFE, OpenNESS and ROBIN; he is also Editor-in-Chief of the international Elsevier Scientific Journal “ Ecosystem Services”.

Wolfgang Cramer (Professor, Dr.), , IMBE, FR environmental geographer and global ecologist, is one of the founding directors of the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE), established in Aix-en-Provence, Marseille and Avignon (France) in 2012. Wolfgang Cramer received his academic training at the Universities of Gießen/Germany (geography, diploma 1981) and Uppsala/Sweden (plant ecology, Ph.D. 1986). From 1987 to 1993, he taught and conducted his research at the Department of Geography, Trondheim University (Norway) while also being a frequently visiting scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. In 1992, he joined the newly founded Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) as head of the department "Global Change and Natural Systems". In 2003, he was appointed full professor of global ecology at Potsdam University. The scientific contributions by Cramer's research group (130+ papers) were initially in the area of modelling forest dynamics under climate change. He then began to seek a broader understanding of biosphere dynamics at the global and continental scale, including aspects of natural and human disturbance as well as biodiversity. He has been directing a large European ecosystem modelling project, ATEAM (EU FP5), as well as its companion outreach activity, AVEC. Together, these projects have resulted in the first ever region-specific and comprehensive ecosystem service assessment across Europe, communicated through the scientific literature as well as through an intensive stakeholder dialogue. Based on ATEAM/AVEC, he has established, in 2003, popular annual summer schools for young experts in the field of biodiversity and ecosystem services (since 2006 for the EU Network of Excellence ALTER-Net). Professor Cramer is a contributor in many roles to the IPCC and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. For Future Earth, he co-chairs the Science Committee of ecoSERVICES. He is chief editor (now with James Ford, Montreal) of the journal Regional Environmental Change. He also regularly serves as advisor of the German and French governments, as well as the EU Research Directorate. His personal web page is here: http://www.imbe.fr/wolfgang-cramer

Uta Fritsch, EURAC Project, IT is currently working at the research institute EURAC (European Academy, Bolzano Italy) in the department of science communication. She is in charge for a project called EURAC junior that aims at a permanent interface between research and schools in South Tyrol, by creating various occasions for communicating current research topics of science to young adults. She was involved with the set-up of the ALTER-Net summer school in Peyresq and has been tutoring many years as well as contributing to the working group set-up. Her interests are ecology and global change at large, particularly landscape ecology and ecosystem services. She has been working in several European research projects at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). For her PhD at the University of Potsdam in the department of Geo-ecology and PIK she was developing and modeling land use scenarios for investigating the influence of land use changes on flood runoff generation. Prior to this she studied Geo-ecology at the University of Potsdam triggered by her love to nature. Since then her interests have expanded from environmental research to teaching and education. More info at: http://www.eurac.edu/de/aboutus/organisation/servicedepartments/press/pages/staffdetails.aspx?persId=10223

Erik Gómez-Baggethun (PhD), NINA, NO is a Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), associate researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), and a Senior Visiting Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. His research covers various aspects in ecological economics and political ecology with a focus on the ecology and economics of ecosystem services and biodiversity, field in which he has produced multiple scientific articles, book chapters and policy reports. He serves as vice president for the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) and in the editorial board of several international scientific journals. He was lead author of the report ‘The economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB) and chapter coordinator for the Convention on Biological Diversity’s report ‘Cities and biodiversity Outlook’ (CBO-1). He currently participates as expert for the International Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). More info: http://www.nina.no/english/Contact/Employees/Employee-info/AnsattID/15226; http://www.uam.es/gruposinv/socioeco/en/ficha_equipo_EGomez_en.htm; http://www.eco2bcn.es/?q=node/48

Francine Hughes, Anglia Ruskin Univ., UK is based in the life Sciences Department of Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. I was brought up in Wales and have always loved being in the hills or by the coast. I studied geography at the University of Cambridge and was lucky to go on an undergraduate expedition to climb in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. As it was also the summer of my undergraduate dissertation project I had to collect field data while there and spent many happy days studying the flora of moraines that were within a high altitude bog.  I was particularly fascinated by a Primula species that stood in frozen glacial melt water at night and in a dry stream bed by day and I became very interested in wetlands and the relationships between plants and hydrological patterns within them. I guess that set the scene for an MSc at the University of Calgary in Canada during which time I worked in the Peace-Athabasca and Mackenzie deltas on the downstream impacts of dams on deltaic wetland ecosystems.  This experience then eventually led to my PhD in Kenya on the downstream impacts of dams on the floodplain forests of the Tana River.  I have worked on wetlands ever since, mostly on the regeneration and restoration of European floodplain forests, with funding from the EU and in the company of many delightful European academics with whom I have hugely enjoyed working in partnership.  In recent years I have carried out my research closer to home, at a local fen wetland called Wicken Fen.  It is a small National Nature Reserve, famous for its invertebrate diversity and over the last twenty years has been expanding by converting adjacent, intensively-farmed, arable land to new wetland habitats.  A group of Cambridge-based academics and conservation NGOs became interested in trying to find ways of measuring and comparing the ecosystem services of the restored wetlands at Wicken Fen with those of the adjacent land still used for arable agriculture. We eventually produced a toolkit for ecosystem services assessment (called TESSA http://tessa.tools/ ) for use at any site of biodiversity conservation interest. I found working on this toolkit very challenging from a   technical angle but also remain quite skeptical about whether or not this kind of valuation is a good approach to helping conserve nature. I look forwards to some lively debates on this topic while in Peyresq! My university web page address is: http://ww2.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/faculties/fst/departments/lifesciences/staff/doctor_franc_hughes.html

Carsten Neßhöver, , UFZ, DE born in Cologne, works as Deputy Head of the Department of Conservation Biology at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig, Germany. He holds an MSc and PhD in Geo-ecology from the University of Bayreuth. His work focuses mainly on the science-policy interfaces for biodiversity and ecosystem services from national to global level. This work is carried out at UFZ in the interdisciplinary UFZ science-policy-expert group (see http://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=31833). Before joining the UFZ in 2004, he worked at the University of Bayreuth (Bayreuth Centre for Terrestrial Ecosystem Research, BITÖK) on his PhD in the field of experimental biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research and on developing concepts for improving science-policy interfaces. At UFZ, Carsten is in charge of the implementation of the national platform for biodiversity research in Germany together with other partners (www.biodiversity.de). On the European level, he was the coordinator of the Coordination Action KNEU (www.biodiversitknowledge.eu), designing a network of knowledge to better support evidence-based policy making in Europe. Other EU projects he was involved in include SPIRAL, BIOPLATFORM and FRAP. Also, Carsten serves as secretary of the Steering Committee of EPBRS and is involved in the management board of ALTER-Net. From 2008 to 2010, he was vice-coordinator of the Scientific Coordination carried out by UFZ for the international study on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB, www.teebweb.org), which aims at outlining the relevance of sustaining biodiversity  for human well-being in economic terms. Link to Carsten’s website is: http://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=4973

Taru Peltola, Irstea, FR: I spent my childhood in a small village in Eastern Finland, in the middle of forests. Although I did not understand it then, I happened to live through an era of local environmental awakening and forest conflicts. This might have affected my career choices. Interested in environmental social science, I began studying geography at the University of Joensuu and environmental policy at the University of Tampere, graduated (1997) and took my PhD (2007) at the University of Tampere. I am a senior researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute SYKE (currently on leave to work as a senior environmental sociologist at the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, Irstea). In addition, I act as an adjunct professor at the University of Eastern Finland, teaching natural resources policy. Major part of my work has dealt with forests and forestry. In my thesis, I studied the use of timber resources in bioenergy production and my post doctoral project focused on the use of ecological knowledge in forestry. Moreover, I am interested in animals living in the forest. My current projects include research on human-bear cohabitation, wolf-dog conflicts, illegal hunting and wildlife tourism in rural areas. In my research I have tried to understand the possibilities to achieve changes in established social and economic practices towards more sustainable ones, and resolve the problems related to society-nature interaction.

Mark Rounsevell, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK is Professor of Rural Economy and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the effects of environmental change on rural and urban landscapes with an emphasis on land-use change modelling and socio-ecological systems analysis. These methods are used to explore the effect of alternative futures of climate and other environmental change drivers on society and land use systems. He was a lead author to the 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th Assessment Reports of Working Group II of the IPCC and is a member of the Expert Panel of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (phase 2). He is also a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Future Earth AIMES project (Analysis & Integrated Modelling of the Earth System), and has contributed to the scoping of the IPBES Regional Assessments (Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services). He coordinates the European Commission funded OPERAs project (OPerationalizing Ecosystem Research Applications, www.operas-project.eu) and contributes to the LUC4C project (Land-use change: assessing the net climate forcing, and options for climate change mitigation and adaptation, luc4c.eu) and IMPRESSIONS project (Impacts and risks from high-end scenarios: Strategies for innovative solutions, www.impressions-project.eu). Webpage: www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/geosciences/people?indv=1543&cw_xml=person.html

Martin Sharman, formerly European Commission, SE. I grew up in Eastern Africa (in order, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Kenya, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Kenya again, Uganda, and Kenya again) at a time when Africa was a vast wilderness. Roads outside towns were unsurfaced, often unmaintained, and wildlife roamed everywhere, including the garden of whichever house he and his parents happened to be living in. I was deeply influenced by this direct and intimate contact with nature. After leaving high school in Kenya I went to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, first to study maths, physics and computer science, and later zoology, ecology and genetics. I became close friends with a group of primatologists, and decided to follow that interest for my PhD at St Andrews. I was offered a place in a field station in Senegal to study the ethology of the Guinea baboon (Papio papio). I wrote up my thesis at the University of Cambridge, where I had the great fortune to find mentors among some of the world’s foremost anthropologists, primatologists and mammal researchers of the day. During this period, I returned to Nairobi from time to time, noting each time remarkable and distressing anthropogenic step changes in the state of the natural environment. The wilderness morphed into over-grazed ranch-land. Cattle swept away gazelle and giraffe, buffalo and baboons. I wondered about the sustainability of the human enterprise. I returned to Senegal to work as a field ecologist for the FAO, then moved to Nairobi to work with UNEP. I subsequently took a post at Goddard Space Flight Centre as a post-doctoral fellow with the US National Science Foundation. From there I went to work with the European Commission at the Joint Research Centre in Ispra, and then moved to Brussels where I worked as Policy Officer for Biodiversity in the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission.  I was a member of the European Commission delegation to Convention on Biological Diversity CoP and SBSTTA, and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. I was a founder member of the European Platform for Biodiversity Research Strategy and served on its steering committee for 12 years. I have participated in the ALTER-Net summer schools at Peyresq for so long that people think I’m part of the furniture. I view ecosystem services, the modern answer to saving the natural world, as at best naively misguided, and at worst a neo-liberal sleight of hand to despoil the remaining wild spaces of our world while claiming to protect them. Phrases like natural capital, green infrastructure and nature-based solutions are in my view the landing strips for a neo-liberal cargo cult, part of a world view that not only admits no ethical responsibility for nature, but fatally misapprehends the relationship between humans and nature. Unable to stop the Vogons, I retired at the end of 2012 and am now trying to become a better photographer.

Francis Turkelboom, INBO, BE: Since 2009, I am leading the Research Group Nature and Society at INBO (Institute of Nature and Forest Research, Belgium).  After studying geography and agricultural engineering (with a major on land management and tropical agriculture), I choose for working overseas.  My first assignment was in North-Thailand, where I did research in hill tribe villages on the impact of intensified steepland agriculture on land degradation.  It was during this period that I expanded my interest to the social aspect of natural resources management.  I started to ask questions to myself, such as:  Why farmers use farming practices that so obviously result in severe land degradation?  What are drivers behind this degradation?  Why farmers do not invest in soil conservation measures, which seem so clearly to provide benefits to them?  This research resulted in a PhD, where I aimed to provide more holistic answers on these questions.  Next step was Bhutan, where I worked within the Ministry of Renewable Natural Resources.  Here I became familiar with a unique approach for development (Gross Natural Happiness), which entails a great respect for culture and nature.   Together with my Bhutanese colleagues, we studied how common-pool natural resources were used, and provided guidelines to the ministry on how to stimulate their sustainable use.  For a next assignment, I wanted to change to a complete new ecosystem, and started working for ICARDA in Syria.   Here we focused on participatory development of alternative agricultural techniques in order to cope with desertification.  A special project was Sebkha-al-Jabul, a unique wetland and nature reserve.   Here we used the ecosystems services approach to highlight the need for a more careful management and governance for this Ramsar site.  In 2007, I returned to Belgium and started working as ecosystem services researcher, which was then a new research approach at INBO.   We applied the concept mainly in the agricultural and water management context, and recently also in the urban context.  We mainly look at the demand side of ecosystem services, via social research and/or participatory approaches.   Our research group is involved in several European FP7 projects, such as OpenNESS, BESAFE and Citi-SENSE.

Marie Vandewalle, UFZ, DE: I am a plant ecologist with broad interests in the mechanisms driving/promoting Biodiversity and in the links between Biodiversity and human well-being. My research includes the assessment of the effects of land use change and other drivers on Biodiversity, the development of methods for monitoring Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the identification of basic attributes for a better organisation and communication of knowledge for biodiversity management and the development of the Biodiversity Science-Society-Policy interface. I finished my PhD at Lund University in 2011 and started directly working within the Science-Policy group at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig. I was involved in the EU project RUBICODE and was the project manager of the EU-funded coordination action KNEU (www.biodiversityknowledge.eu) at UFZ. The KNEU project designed a Network of Knowledge approach aiming at better bridging biodiversity knowledge and decision making in Europe. I am also involved in a number of activities within the UFZ Science-Policy Expert Group, including the work in facilitating the development process of the IPBES stakeholder engagement strategy and my recent appointment as Secretary of the ALTER-Net summer school. I was a student at the Summer School (then called AVEC) already back in 2005 and was a tutor in 2012 and 2014.

You can find further information on my personal webpage: http://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=21430 or find me on Linkedin or ResearchGate.

Allan Watt, CEH, UK works for the UK NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), leading research on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services at CEH Edinburgh. After studying agricultural science at Glasgow University and doing a PhD on insect ecology at the University of East Anglia he worked on the population dynamics of the coypu before spending two years at Southampton University on agricultural pest management. He moved to Edinburgh in 1982 to work for the Institute for Terrestrial Ecology (which later became CEH), focussing initially on forest pests. He then became interested in the biodiversity of tropical forests, working on projects in West Africa, Latin America and Indonesia. In 1999 he moved to CEH Banchory, where he became site director, and his research focus switched to collaborative projects in Europe. He was the project coordinator of BioAssess (Biodiversity Assessment Tools), BIOFORUM (European Biodiversity Forum - Implementing the Ecosystem Approach), and SPIRAL (Science-Policy Interfaces for Biodiversity: Research, Action, and Learning: http://www.spiral-project.eu/ and @SPIRAL_project). He was deputy coordinator of the ALTER-Net project (A Long Term Biodiversity, Ecosystem and Awareness Research Network) and is now a chair of the ALTER-Net Management Board. In 2007 he moved back to CEH Edinburgh. His research includes developing methods for quantifying and monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services, the impact of land use change, climate change and other drivers of biodiversity loss, identifying and managing conflicts between human activities and the conservation of biodiversity, and the biodiversity science-policy-society interface. He has published over 90 papers in scientific journals, six books, and over 80 book chapters, articles etc. He has been a convener of the ALTER-Net Summer School on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services since 2008.