upon creating a new maven project I get the popup box saying

"Maven projects need to be imported: Import Changes Enable Auto-Import"

Answer:

From the documentation.

Select this check box, if you want IntelliJ IDEA to perform reimport automatically each time you change your pom.xml.

 it just automatically updates project details upon POM change. Generally it tells IDEA that, for example, dependencies for those new external classes you started using in your code can be found in updated version of POM.

IntelliJ: Maven projects need to be imported: Import Changes Enable Auto-Import