Les Kaufman, PI of the project on MIMES/MIDAS is a Professor of Biology at Boston University Marine Program and Marine Conservation Fellow, Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Ecosystem Science and Economics at Conservation International. His area of interest include marine biology, evolutionary ecology, and conservation biology. Kaufman works at three scales: ecosystem, community, and organism. At the ecosystem scale, Kaufman and his colleagues are working on the fundamental dynamics of coupled human-natural systems (CHANS), in pursuit of a rigorous science of sustainability. The modeling and decision tool approach is called MIMES-MIDAS. The models are dynamic and spatially explicit, and can be used to reveal ecosystem service tradeoffs and outcome scenarios under alternative policies. The data input into these model is multi-source stemming from new observational and analytical methods as well as traditional spatial data from GIS and remote sensing sources. The MIMES-MIDAS approach has been applied to coastal Massachusetts and the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary as well as the Lower Mekong Basin in Cambodia with a focus on the Tonle Sap (Great Lake); the Gulf of Honduras and Mesoamerican Reef in Belize; and the Nile Valley/Great Lakes region of East Africa.