Compton J. Tucker III

Compton Tucker is a physical scientist known for work with satellites to study land vegetation. His research has used time-series observations to study vegetation primary production at continental to global scales using AVHRR 4 km & MODIS 250 m data. He has also used large volumes of 50 cm commercial satellite data to map billions of individual semi-arid trees using machine learning & high-performance computing. He was born in Carlsbad NM and attended Colorado State University with a BA degree in biology in 1969, a MS degree in 1973, and a PhD in 1975. For his MS and PhD degrees he studied grassland vegetation spectroscopy with NSF’s Grassland Biome. He became a NAS postdoctoral fellow at NASA Goddard in 1975, where his graduate spectroscopy work resulted in spectral modifications to 18 NASA & NOAA satellites. He became a NASA employee in 1977 and Senior Earth Scientist in 1992. He retired from NASA in 2025. From 1977 to 2025 he extensively used satellite data. He is now with the University of Maryland.

He is a Fellow of the AGU, the AAAS, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Awards include NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, the Henry Shaw Medal from the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Collins Current Achievement Award from the National Air and Space Museum, the Galathea Medal from the Royal Danish Geographical Society, the Pecora Award from the US Geological Survey, and the Vega Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography. He was a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer in 2019-2020. He has published ~240 journal articles that have been cited ~100,000 times according to Google Scholar.