Tucker, Compton

Bio

Dr. Compton Tucker is a Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Tucker is known for pioneering satellite-based time-series monitoring of land vegetation for continental and global studies starting in 1982 for land photosynthesis, defeating desert locusts, determining land cover, mapping droughts, enabling food security, identifying weather-linked disease outbreaks and identifying land degradation. He was assisted by Brent Holben, Chris Justice and John Townshend in these efforts, and collaborated with Piers Sellers starting in 1982, who provided the theoretical background that the NDVI was vegetation photosynthetic capacity. 

Tucker also used Landsat data to study forest conditions, deforestation and glacier extent.  Recently, he used large volumes of 50 cm commercial satellite data to map discrete semi-arid trees and convert these into carbon at the tree level.