 Welcome everybody. It's a pleasure to have you as participants of this school. It's also my pleasure to organize with school together with Antonia Celani, Matteo Marsili, and Simon Leib. In this video, we want to give you some information about the virtual location of this school and the content and some practical information about how this school will look like. So I'll leave the word to Matteo Marsili to say something about ICTP. Hello, I'm Matteo Marsili from the quantitative life science section of ICTP. And so ICTP was founded in 1964 by Abdul Salam, who was a Nobel Prize in physics, with the mission of sharing scientific knowledge with scientists from all over the world, in particular too, with scientists in developing countries. So indeed, in normal times, we have many visitors, around 5,000 visitors a year in our workshop. We organize around 50 to 60 workshops. That is not possible during these times because of COVID. So this is why we moved most of our activities online. And so ICTP also has a resident faculty of scientists in different areas of physics, spanning from mathematics and high energy and condensed matter, to the newly opened section in quantitative life sciences, and also in earth system physics. So the understanding of the science and actually the interest of theoretical physicists were much broader than physics, because something that characterized the activity of ICTP since its beginning and indeed the activities in mathematical ecology, for example, have been initiated since the early 80s by Simon and co-workers and collaborators, Gross and Hallam. And this is part of this interdisciplinary effort of ICTP, which Antonio will tell us more about. Oh, Jacopo. Yeah, welcome everybody. That's the usual gag. It's a pleasure to welcome you virtually at ICTP for this winter school, which is part of a series of schools that started in 2012. So these schools take place alternately in Trieste at ICTP and in Bangalore at the Institute for Theoretical Science, ICPS, International Center for Theoretical Science. And these schools deal with different subjects which have to do with biology and their subject changes from year to year. So for instance, last year it was about morphogenesis, two years back we had a school on neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and next year we will have a school on the neuroscience of behavior. So it's very diverse in subjects. Also, as you will appreciate, very diverse in participation nationalities. So this year, as you know, everything will be special. Maybe from next year we will resume some part of in-person activities for the school. An opportunity for us to explore new ways of doing schools. So I would be grateful if we can receive after school some feedback from you about the things that you like the most and the ones that you, for which you have suggestions on how we can improve. So maybe from now on we can have sort of the benefits of in-person meetings joined with the benefits of remote meetings as well. And with that, I keep back the floor to Luya. Hello. I'm Simon Movin. I'm at Princeton University. I've been involved with ICTP for nearly 40 years. And in a very long career in theoretical and mathematical ecology, one of my most rewarding experiences has been my long involvement with ICTP. My first experience was in co-directing along with Tom Hallam University of Tennessee, the first school and research workshop on the topic in 1982. And that was before the Adriatic Hotel was even available, so we stayed in town. And I've been involved in a wide variety of schools and workshops ever since on topics that range from ecology to economics, but with a strong dose of climate change and other applications. Gross joined us as a co-director in 1986. Giovanni Vitosich was our contacted ICT. Peef, later followed by Matteo. And Abdus Salam was still the director of ICTP, although we later worked with a very supportive succession of directors. It's been a great experience. The schools and workshops produced a series of texts and research collections, including foundational theoretical work, but also applications to epidemiology, to ecotoxicology, to fisheries, to conservation biology. These topics remain current. You'll hear about them in the next couple of weeks. They're important in the face of biodiversity loss of climate change and the current pandemic that's keeping us really apart. The topics that we addressed in the early meetings remain the core of what we're going to do in this school. But there are a whole new set of issues that I think will occupy the attention of theoretical ecologists in the coming decade. We're largely at the interface between ecology, including biogeochemistry and stoichiometry and economics and the other social sciences. On the one hand, economics and the social sciences are going to help us to better understand collective behavior in non-human groups, as well as other aspects of animal behavior and issues of public goods like nitrogen fixation and cooperation. On the other hand, the interface with human decisions and economics are going to be central to our understanding the global environmental problems facing us, including sustainability and problems of the global commons like climate change. So we will touch on these topics this time. And next time we have one of these, I expect they will have an even bigger role. They represent, for me, the next frontier. In this school, we're going to address a range of fundamental problems in ecology and epidemiology, including the analysis of higher order interactions, of critical transitions and regime shifts, including even links to paleo-ecology. Network methods are going to have special attention. The new cadre of lecturers that we have this year will address some issues we haven't explored here in detail before, like the role of viruses and structuring marine ecosystems, the role of fire in arid and semi-arid savannas. We'll learn about river networks from one of the masters of the subject and about the assembly of ecosystems at multiple scales, from microbes to broader patterns. And the relation to genomics and metagenomics. Of course, diseases will continue to apply a large place, as they must in these times, and with a strong link to phylo dynamics. So welcome to the school. I'm looking forward to it. I expect a very productive few weeks, and I know it will lead to interactions and collaborations that will, for many of you, last the rest of your careers. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Simon, Antonio and Matteo for the interesting and nice words. So I want to share with you some practical information about the school. So, you, most of the information, everything you need to know about the organization of the school is in the website of the school that you can access where you can find the program, the titles of the lecture. But I want to start by introducing you. So you, the participants that are really the fabric of the school are really coming from every corner of our planet. And we accepted more than 275 participants and more are still applying. So we are very happy about this participation and we look forward to the virtual interaction with all of you. So as I said, to URL that are very important one is the website of the school where you can find all the information on the program. It is as it involves many participants and many speaker, it will be changing so please check it regularly. And for every matter concerning the organization of the schools certificate of attendance, please write to the email address in the bottom right of the slide. So, the one of the challenge we had to face in organizing the school is that we have lecturers and participants coming from many different times zones. So we try to make the best possible compromise compromise, which of course is not perfect but we hope is good enough. So most of the lectures all the lectures will be in the European afternoons. And we have from three to five lectures afternoons, and we have different types of activities. In the first days we will have tutorials, which are aimed to be very basic introduction to the technical tools that are needed to understand the following lectures. We have live lectures, and most of the speakers are giving three lectures. Then we have a couple of recorded lectures that will be available on YouTube and on the website. And on the second week of the school there will be a question and answer live with the speakers so please watch the lectures in advance and come to the session with questions. And in the last week of the school we will have other lectures but also seminars and round tables with the lecturers and other speakers. One important aspect of the school is that all the lectures are going to be one hour long, but as you can see from the program, there will be a 50 minute breaks break between the lectures. So this is really a break so you can take a coffee, go away from the screen. But if you want to stay there, we will use breakout rooms and you can have informal conversations with other participants. We will try to mimic the informal interactions that we have in normal times with the schools in present so between lectures there will be times to know other participants discuss about the topics. And all of these will be informal so you can participate if you want. So we will use Zoom for the lectures, for the live lectures. Please install the last version so make sure you have a version 5 or following. So then you can use all the features that we are going to use during lectures. And as I said, of course we cannot find a compromise, a perfect compromise between all the different time zones, but don't worry about that. Every lectures will be recorded and available on YouTube and some of those will be also live stream. So there is also that possibility to follow the lectures. With that, we are really looking forward to meeting you virtually and to this marathon of three weeks of quantitative ecosystem ecology. And we hope to have interesting conversation and discussion with you all. So thank you very much. Thank you. Bye.