 The environmental profile focuses on the human pressures on and threats to aquatic ecosystems and water resources. The master's program's profiles can run in a single track or cut across different tracks. This is exciting because this means that you have a lot of flexibility when composing your own trajectory. We try to focus on different types of questions. We ask fundamental questions, for example, how does a river change physically, biologically and chemically, along its course given natural conditions. We also ask applied questions, for example, how does a river or a wetland system change due to the input of excess nutrients or sediments from land use, and how do people's livelihoods and habitat conservation interrelate? How can we transform agricultural ecosystems to be more sustainable? And how can we restore aquatic ecosystems that have been impacted by different human pressures? We use a variety of different tools and methods to answer these questions. This can range from doing analytical work in a laboratory to going into the field where we learn about the different approaches used in river or wetland restoration. We might also visit different stakeholders and interview them and try to understand their perspectives of environmental issues and of the sustainable use of resources. We cannot manage what we do not understand and we cannot understand what we do not measure. The concepts, methods and tools that you will learn in the environmental profile will help you manage and address some of the most pressing environmental issues that we are facing in this century, including unsustainable resource use, biodiversity loss and climatic change.