About

Les Kaufman is a Professor of Biology at Boston University, with a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. His laboratory is dedicated to understanding the processes that create, maintain, extinguish, and conserve aquatic biodiversity across marine, freshwater, and watershed ecosystems in both temperate and tropical environments. His research focuses on two main areas: the fundamental dynamics of coupled human-natural systems (CHANS), which underpin sustainable economies and ecosystems inhabited by people, and the study of degradation and regenerative processes on coral reefs. In his work on CHANS, Kaufman employs modern observational and experimental methods, along with computer modeling and decision tools like MIMES-MIDAS, to explore ecosystem service tradeoffs and scenario outcomes under different policies. His empirical contributions include fieldwork in community ecology, fish biology, fisheries science, and food web reconstruction. His coral reef research involves active field sites such as Biscayne Bay, the Florida Reef Tract, the Mesoamerican Reef, and the Phoenix Islands, where he conducts experiments in coral ontogeny and restoration, often collaborating with conservation organizations and universities. Kaufman is also engaged in aquatic conservation policy and innovation, working closely with various labs at Boston University, conservation organizations, and government agencies. He serves on the Steering Committee for NOAA’s Coral Restoration Consortium and is committed to developing conservation solutions for vulnerable ecosystems, especially in New England.

Research topics

• Geography
• Ecology
• Biology
• Fishery
• Virology
• Medicine
• Environmental science
• Environmental resource management
• Natural resource economics
• Economics
• Remote sensing
• Environmental health
• Civil engineering
• Environmental planning
• Engineering
• Demography
• Business
• Agroforestry
• Pathology

Selected publications

• Climate change, transactional sex, HIV/AIDS and sustainable livelihoods among fishing communities around Lake Victoria: a scoping review protocol

  BMJ Open · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: The objective of this scoping review is to map out what has been published in the scientific literature on the relationship between climate change-related events and how these overlap with associated changes in resource availability, transactional sex and HIV incidence and prevalence, within fishing communities in the Lake Victoria basin. This objective is informed by the fact that climate change and the associated natural resource strains in the Lake Victoria region have exacerbated existing inequities within fishing communities. Vulnerable populations, especially women, engage in strategies such as transactional sex to cope with the uncertainty of natural resource-dependent livelihoods. This practice greatly increases women's risk of contracting HIV in this region, with prevalence rates four to five times the national averages. This scoping review will thus show how the existing empirical literature reports on climate change, transformation in natural resources and livelihoods, and transactional sex and HIV in the Lake Victoria region. METHODS: Studies that meet the following inclusion criteria will be included: align with at least two of the major concepts of interest, including climate change, transactional sex, HIV/AIDS, Lake Victoria Basin and/or empirical studies; are published in English and after 2012; and focus on the Lake Victoria basin. The scoping review will be guided by the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis: Scoping Reviews, supported by the standard principles of Arksey and O'Malley. The specific search strategies to be implemented were developed with guidance from an experienced research librarian to align with the inclusion criteria. The search will be conducted in relevant global databases, with two reviewers screening the results and extracting relevant data points. Finally, results will be reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews flow diagram, and summarised in figures, tables and text. DISCUSSION: The scoping review is designed to comprehensively scope the existing literature and document the coverage of linkages between transactional sex, HIV/AIDS and sustainable livelihoods in the context of climate change with a view to informing health systems responses to human health specific to the HIV epidemic. SCOPING REVIEW REGISTRATION: The proposed scoping review is registered with the Open Science Foundation (OSF), registration number:https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/9DTW4.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Making the Most of Available Data: A Case Study of Converging Analyses to Model an Emerging Fishery for Jonah Crab (<scp><i>Cancer borealis</i></scp>)

  Fish and Fisheries · 2025-08-18

  article

  ABSTRACT Targeted fishing of Jonah crabs ( Cancer borealis ) has greatly intensified in recent decades as lobster populations have declined, forcing fishermen to shift their focus to Jonah and other crab species. Effective management of this developing fishery is limited, however, by a lack of information on their life history traits, abundance and distribution. The long‐term sustainability of the fishery depends upon near‐term efforts to maximise the value of existing data sources to assess species abundance and inform management. We applied three distinct modelling approaches—traditional linear regression, generalised additive models and empirical dynamic modelling—to data from the Maine–New Hampshire Inshore Trawl Survey to validate hypotheses about Jonah crab distribution and migration earlier derived from interviews with fishermen. There was strong agreement between the information reported by fishermen and the survey data, including depth preferences, seasonal inshore–offshore movements and sex‐specific migration patterns. This study demonstrates that rather than simply deploying a multi‐modal approach with model selection or averaging, employing a complement of statistical methods convergently and interfacing with engaged social science can better capitalise on limited fishery‐independent data to support the development of sustainable management frameworks for emerging fisheries.

  PublisherDOI

• Bibliometric Analysis of Ecosystem Services and Stakeholder Engagement in the Mangrove Communities of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean

  Preprints.org · 2025-12-17

  preprintOpen access

  Understanding the services provided by coastal ecosystems is vital for their study, preservation, and restoration. Mangrove forests, in particular, provide key ecosystem ser-vices: they sequester carbon, support fisheries and biodiversity, and enable sustainable tourism. In the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, mangrove-related services have been stud-ied extensively, but often in fragmented ways. This meta-analysis combines literature re-view, bibliometric tools, and thematic mapping to identify emerging trends and long-standing gaps. We analyzed 61 peer-reviewed studies across 21 sovereign and U.S. states, highlighting shifting research priorities and the lack of convergence across ecosys-tem service categories. While early research emphasized supporting services such as fish-ery nurseries, recent studies focus on regulating services, especially carbon sequestration. Stakeholder engagement remains limited, with only 18% of studies incorporating local or institutional perspectives. We argue for greater integration of stakeholder input and con-vergence across service categories to enhance the scientific basis for mangrove manage-ment and policy design.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effects of Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) cage aquaculture on water quality in the world’s largest tropical lake

  Journal of Great Lakes Research · 2025-04-04 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Cage aquaculture in tropical lakes is an efficient means of generating fish protein to ensure food security and support livelihoods. However, it has been repeatedly criticized as injurious to lake ecosystems due to eutrophication and other problems, and therefore ill-advised. This study examined the impacts of Nile tilapia ( Oreochromis niloticus ) cage farming on water quality across spatial scales in the world’s largest tropical lake, Lake Victoria. The primary objectives were to determine if water quality patterns differed between cage and control stations along a background limnological gradient, and to identify the water quality variables that contributed most to these differences. We postulated that the spatial arrangement of sites in the lake would drive overarching patterns of water quality variation, while cage aquaculture would have additional impacts on these parameters across the spatial gradient. Water column samples were collected from both cage and control stations at four locations along a known gradient in limnology, across 2 years. The results revealed significant differences in water quality between cage and control stations at all four sites, with dissolved oxygen, pH, and silica contributing the most to these differences. These findings highlight the need for site-specific management strategies to both mitigate the environmental impacts of cage aquaculture in tropical lakes and ensure continuity of aquaculture production. Our study provides an approach that can be applied to tropical lakes and reservoirs around the world. Effective nutrient management and continuous monitoring are recommended to support sustainable aquaculture in ecosystems under stress from growing lakeside populations.

  PublisherDOI

• Spatial Planning Offshore Wind Energy Farms in California for Mediating Fisheries, Seabird, and Whale Population Impacts

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Spatial planning offshore wind energy farms in California for mediating fisheries and wildlife conservation impacts

  Environmental Development · 2024-05-15 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Achieving a blue economy will require reconciling the value of emerging ocean uses with their impacts on the seascape and sectors with historical access to marine resources and areas. To meet this challenge, we developed an analytical framework for conducting marine spatial planning through tradeoff analysis, and applied it to prospective offshore wind energy development in the ∼974 km2 Morro Bay, California, USA Wind Energy Area (WEA). We generated spatial data layers estimating MW power production and impacts on fisheries value and marine wildlife conservation (seabird and cetacean populations) from wind farm development. We then quantified each sector’s response to plans of development across the WEA and inside three leases recently acquired by the energy industry for prospective development. Finally, we integrated the sector response data into an analytical framework for mitigating sector tradeoffs with novel spatial planning solutions (maps of wind farm size, location, and configuration) that optimally maximize value to the emergent energy sector (MW power) while minimizing impacts to historical (fisheries and wildlife) sectors. We found that western sites in the WEA had the highest potential power production concurrent with the lowest impact on the historical sectors, revealing the eastern lease to be less efficient at optimally balancing the sector’s objectives relative to the development of the central or western leases or the optimal spatial plans identified in the tradeoff analysis. Within a lease, tradeoff analysis found spatial planning able to generate out-sized savings in fisheries value with only modest losses in MW power – for example, by avoiding development in just 5% of the eastern lease to preserve nearly half its fisheries value and still generate 95% its total power potential. Small-scale development opportunities (e.g., a pilot project) with significant power potential and no fisheries impact were also identified, in this case by placing turbines in an area in the western lease with no fisheries value and high power production potential. These plans would also have a relatively low impact on the wildlife conservation sectors, due to decreases in vulnerability levels of both seabird and cetacean populations to turbines going from east to west across the WEA. Our results can inform site evaluation and permitting processes for wind energy development in the Morro Bay WEA. We also expect the tradeoff analysis framework we developed to provide a simple and actionable analytical tool for supporting marine spatial planning of offshore wind energy and other emerging blue economy activities from a balanced perspective that values emerging uses of marine resources alongside existing socio-economic and conservation interests.

  PublisherDOI

• Mapping the dynamics of aquatic vegetation in Lake Kyoga and its linkages to satellite lakes

  Science of Remote Sensing · 2024-08-13 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Lake Kyoga is a shallow, young, flooded basin just north of and about 30m lower than Lake Victoria. The catchment encompasses Lake Kyoga itself, and a constellation of several dozen small satellite lakes following valley contours mostly to its east. The Kyoga basin fish fauna shares many non-cichlid species plus a spectacular, partially endemic radiation of haplochromine cichlids most similar to but still largely distinct from those in Lake Victoria. This fish fauna is of high conservation concern, as it preserves remnants of the regional species flock that have disappeared from Lake Victoria and Lake Kyoga, leaving small remnant populations in some of the satellite lakes. Now, these too are imperiled by limnological dynamics, including fluctuations in the nature and extent of aquatic vegetation. The water bodies in the Kyoga Basin are highly dynamic due both to fluctuation in water level and large amplitude variation in marginal and floating vegetation. This variation has profound evolutionary and conservation implications, since it can create and destroy critical aquatic habitat. It can also alternately anneal and cleave gene flow over time, both between the main lake and its satellites, and among the satellite lakes. The aquatic vegetation cluttering these linkages can create a spatial refugium for many native fish species that are more tolerant of hypoxia than an introduced macropredator, the Nile perch. Anthropogenic impacts to this region have greatly increased in recent years, altering relationships between aquatic vegetation and endangered species, fisheries and other ecosystem services provided by the lake. Understanding these dynamics require a means of mapping aquatic vegetation, connectivity, and habitat through time. Here we develop a new and improved algorithm to map the spatial distribution and dynamics of floating and emergent aquatic vegetation via remote sensing. We utilize a time series of 440 Landsat images dating from 1986 to 2020. A series of water and vegetation indices are designed to reveal change in the aquascape over time. First, two types of water masks are derived using a majority rule - a separate water mask for each image and a composite water mask of the region over the study period. Second, the difference between the two masks is then used to delineate the potential location of macrophytes over the image. Third, an algorithm is developed to separate the floating vegetation from emergent vegetation; this algorithm uses Landsat spectral bands and two additional spatial and temporal metrics that considerably improve classification accuracy. A more extensive analysis of aquascape trajectories using remote sensing can inform fish conservation strategies and fisheries management and illuminate the role of landscape dynamics in macroevolutionary patterns of aquatic taxa. • Lake Kyoga Lake system is highly dynamic and complex. • Classification accuracy of aquatic vegetation is usually low. • Open water areas are delineated from water indices and adaptive binarization. • Spatial and temporal metrics derived from Landsat Archive greatly improve accuracy. • Application of the maps guides sustainability between stakeholders and wildlife.

  PublisherDOI

• Examining the successional role of Montipora aequituberculata on remote, post-disturbance equatorial reefs

  Marine Ecology Progress Series · 2024-11-28

  article

  Corals are dying globally at unprecedented rates and scales, and we are fast losing our ability to study the ecological dynamics of healthy, successionally mature reef communities. Insight into species-specific competitive dynamics is a necessary tool for assessing reef growth patterns and trajectory. Based on terrestrial successional frameworks, it is currently assumed that fast-growing corals catalyze post-disturbance regrowth and are eventually replaced by competitive, slower-growing species. To test this hypothesis, we assessed the fate of a dynamic, fast-growing, common Pacific coral, Montipora aequituberculata , through photogrammetric analysis of repeated large-area imaging. We used this technology to track ~600 colonies across 6 equatorial islands spanning 2 time points, examining whether colonies of M. aequituberculata were more typically overgrown by other species or able to maintain space and prevent overgrowth by other taxa. To accomplish this goal, we examined temporal dynamics from past-to-future and future-to-past, a new approach for addressing these questions. We found that M. aequituberculata colonies are competitively dominant against ruderal and other competitive taxa but will yield space to stress-tolerant taxa on post-disturbance reefs. Interestingly, we found that M. aequituberculata ’s island-scale interaction patterns—whether colonies successfully overgrew or were overgrown by other benthic taxa—did not necessarily correspond with M. aequituberculata ’s island-scale growth or loss patterns, highlighting local, site-level ecological complexity. Detailed examination of species interactions across spatial scales helps provide a mechanistic understanding of benthic community changes. Understanding and predicting these changes is useful for projecting reef recovery patterns, paving the way toward improved ecological interventions in a changing world.

  PublisherDOI

• The Deforestation and Biodiversity Risks of Power Plant Projects in Southeast Asia: A Big Data Spatial Analytical Framework

  Sustainability · 2023-10-03 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss are now widespread, extremely rapid, and among the top global anthropogenic risks both in terms of likelihood and overall impact. Thorough impact evaluation of these environmental abuses—essential for conservation and future project planning—requires good analysis of local ecological and environmental data in addition to social and economic impacts. We characterized the deforestation and biodiversity impacts of energy investments in Southeast Asia using multiple geospatial data sources related to forest cover and loss data from 2000 to 2018, other landcover data, and the location, type, and characteristics of energy investments. This study paid particular attention to different types of power plants and financing sources. We identified critical buffer zones and forest structures impacted by these projects in accordance with IUCN criteria and spatial ecology. The paper introduces a novel, replicable analytical framework that goes beyond earlier studies in which all forests are treated as equivalent. It characterizes forests based on spatial morphological structures such as core forest, edges, islands, and bridges, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of deforestation and its impacts on biodiversity. Preliminary findings suggest that projects financed by Chinese development banks pose different risks compared to non-Chinese financing. The study also reveals significant differences in biodiversity impacts based on the type of energy source, be it coal or hydro. The study offers critical insights into the trade-offs between energy development and biodiversity conservation. It provides actionable metrics and strategies for policymakers, conservationists, and development banks to prioritize forest and habitat preservation in Southeast Asia and globally.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cycles of fusion and fission enabled rapid parallel adaptive radiations in African cichlids

  Science · 2023-09-28 · 107 citations

  article

  Although some lineages of animals and plants have made impressive adaptive radiations when provided with ecological opportunity, the propensities to radiate vary profoundly among lineages for unknown reasons. In Africa's Lake Victoria region, one cichlid lineage radiated in every lake, with the largest radiation taking place in a lake less than 16,000 years old. We show that all of its ecological guilds evolved in situ. Cycles of lineage fusion through admixture and lineage fission through speciation characterize the history of the radiation. It was jump-started when several swamp-dwelling refugial populations, each of which were of older hybrid descent, met in the newly forming lake, where they fused into a single population, resuspending old admixture variation. Each population contributed a different set of ancient alleles from which a new adaptive radiation assembled in record time, involving additional fusion-fission cycles. We argue that repeated fusion-fission cycles in the history of a lineage make adaptive radiation fast and predictable.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Andrew L. Rhyne

  Roger Williams University

  28 shared

• Colin A. Chapman

  George Washington University

  19 shared

• James A. Morris

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

  18 shared

• Michael F. Tlusty

  University of Massachusetts Boston

  17 shared

• Ronaldo B. Francini‐Filho

  Universidade de São Paulo

  15 shared

• Rodrigo L. Moura

  Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

  13 shared

• David N. Wiley

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

  12 shared

• Elizabeth M. Burmester

  Boston University

  12 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Johns Hopkins University

  1980

Awards & honors

• NOAA’s Coral Restoration Consortium Steering Committee (seco…