  Understanding how young stars and their circumstellar disks form and evolve
is key to explain how planets form. The evolution of the star and the disk is
regulated by different processes, both internal to the system or related to
their environment. The former include accretion of material onto the central
star, wind emission, and photoevaporation of the disk due to high-energy
radiation from the central star. These are best studied spectroscopically, and
the distance to the star is a key parameter in all these studies. Here we
present new estimates of the distance to a complex of nearby star-forming
clouds obtained combining TGAS distances with measurement of extinction on the
line of sight. Furthermore, we show how we plan to study the effects of the
environment on the evolution of disks with Gaia, using a kinematic modelling
code we have developed to model young star-forming regions.
