Every other year, Professor Bradford Gentry (profile) co-teaches a course on emerging markets for ecosystem services. This spring, professors Mark Ashton (F&ES, profile), Maureen Burke (Yale School of Management) and Mike Fotos (Trinity College and visiting at Yale Political Science) co-taught the third offering of this course. Students conduct original research to determine whether markets for ecosystem services are real enough to provide payments and incentives to an actual landowner or land manager. Temple-Inland Corporation, a timber and forest-products company with over two-million acres of land in the southeastern United States, served as the "client" for the course and identified 6,000 acres of land in east Texas to be the focal point of the students’ research.

After several months of preliminary research, the class traveled to Broaddus, Texas to visit the Temple-Inland properties, meet with Temple-Inland staff, as well as numerous local, state and federal players in the markets for carbon, water and biodiversity services. The trip concluded with a presentation of preliminary results to Temple-Inland senior staff at their offices in Diboll, Texas.