John McCombs, MS, BS, Ph.D.

Service Area Expertise: Technology and Science; Project Management and Support; Marketing and Outreach.
John McCombs has vast experience in wildlife management as an expert Lidar analyst, a system administrator, a forestry research associate, and a technical program leader in coastal remote sensing. For seven years, he has led the Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) through the development of three eras of coastal land cover and change mapping as well as his leading the development of a national Sea Level Rise and Coastal Inundation Impacts viewer. His work has helped create a nationally consistent and accurate database of coastal land cover and change information that is a valuable resource for the coastal resource managers. Mr. McCombs has also worked in Incident Command Center for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to support GIS data development and deployment through a web-based interface, transforming raw field data into actionable information for use by management in planning daily missions and analyzing results from previous work.

When faced with NOAA Coastal Services Center’s (CSC’s) desire to have all C-CAP land cover data holdings made available through GoogleEarth, he researched and determined the most appropriate software and methodology to perform the task then create an SOP allowing multiple users to create the new files through the distributed process thereby allowing public access to valuable information without the need for expensive GIS software. This collection of land cover for 29 coastal states was, in some instances, available for the first time and is it was well received by management and heavily accessed by the public.

Mr. McCombs received letters of recognition at CSC for support at the Land Trust Rally, providing land cover data via GoogleEarth, supporting project management at CSC, and Deepwater Horizon Support.

He is a member of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and one-time recipient of the College of Forest Resources Research Support Staff Award. He co-authored Influence of fusing lidar and multispectral imagery on remotely sensed estimates of stand density and mean tree height in a managed loblolly pine plantation (Forest Science). John McCombs founded and served as president of the Mississippi State University chapter of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and served as peer-reviewer for multiple professional remote sensing journals. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Fisheries and Wildlife from Michigan State University, his Masters degree in Wildlife Management from Virginia Tech, and worked towards his Ph.D. in Forestry at Mississippi State University.