#18 – Josh Novac

#17 – Josh Novac

April 23rd, 2025

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Announcer: Welcome to the LIDAR Magazine Podcast, bringing measurement, positioning and imaging technologies to light. This event was made possible thanks to the generous support of rapidlasso, producer of the LAStools software suite.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Welcome to LIDAR Magazine and the LIDAR Magazine podcasts. My name is Stewart Walker. I’m the managing editor of LIDAR Magazine. My guest today is Josh Novac. He is an Associate Vice-President and Program Manager in the Geospatial Mapping and Survey Department of Dewberry. He’s been with the company for 18 years. Josh, we’re delighted to have you on board. It’s a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you for finding time.

Josh Novac: Thanks for having me Stewart.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Now let me just give a couple of quick sentences to set the scene. Dewberry is a family owned business set up more than 60 years ago. It’s headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia. Many listeners will know the company from its role in the quality control of lidar surveys, for example, in the context of the big USGS programs. But of course the firm offers a much broader range of services than that. Indeed, it’s got more than 2500 employees. LIDAR magazine know quite a bit about Dewberry’s work from your press releases, from the many articles by your colleague Dr. Al Karlin and your former colleague Amar Nayegandhi. So Josh, tell me a little bit about yourself. Where were you born and raised? I know you’re an Indiana University graduate in anthropology. So how did you get into the wonderful world of geospatial services provision?

Josh Novac: Yeah, well, I took maybe a bit of a circuitous route to get to geospatial services. But I’m from Northwest Indiana. I grew up in a small town in Northern Indiana, about 45 minutes or so outside of Chicago. But I did start my education at a university called IUPUI in Indianapolis. It was a joint venture between IU and Purdue University. It’s no longer a joint venture between those two organizations. It’s now IU or Purdue.

But I actually started my academic career in mechanical engineering at Purdue. And after two years realized that it really wasn’t for me. I enjoyed the physics. I enjoyed some of the math. But it wasn’t really holding my interest. So I ended up switching, and at that time because it was sort of a cooperative between two universities, it was pretty easy for me to switch to IU. And I thought anthropology was really neat. I wanted to go dig up historical areas and learn about the past and human history. And I thought it was going to be a fascinating career path.

But next door to that was the Geography Department, and they had a poster on the wall. And this was, you know, 2003 or so. And they were talking about a certificate in geospatial information sciences. My wife was also going to school at the same place, and we both read that and said, this looks really cool. And it’s kind of a good blend of science and problem solving and being creative with data. And took a bunch of courses and ended up with a certificate in geospatial information sciences and really just fell into the world of this. And have been in it ever since, and have been really enjoying it.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes, it’s fascinating how different people come in, in different ways. I’ve had a couple of podcasts recently where the guests have come in through “double E” or computer vision. So I guess we’re all different.

Josh Novac: Yeah, and you know, anybody can take a different route, right. It’s a very – you got to find what you’re passionate about. So once you’re passionate about it the rest of the work sort of falls into place, and this is something that I found with geospatial. The industry as a whole, I really love lidar. It’s – you get to do physics and math and science and create products that people actually use.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed. Well, let’s go on and speak a little about your company. I’ve mentioned that Dewberry is famous for its QC work. But I’m interested in exploring what else you think characterizes the company. What are its specialties? And we know it’s a family business. I believe there are family members on the board of directors? But how does that impact the way that you work?

Josh Novac: I’ve been fortunate enough to be with the company for, as you said, 18 years. And in that time I’ve served a lot of different roles. My role now is program manager for a USGS geospatial products and services contract. As well as I lead our remote sensing innovation team, and I serve as sort of the remote sensing subject matter expert for the group when we need to talk out problems.

So I’ve been able to be engaged in a lot of different parts of our company and be a part of how Dewberry has grown in the geospatial industry over these last 18 years. But when you talk about our specialties and what really characterizes the company, I’ll start by saying when Barry Dewberry, who’s the chairman of the board for Dewberry, took over from his father Sid, he outlined some core values that he called Dewberry work. And I know corporations have different ways to show themselves to the outside world. But these values were honesty, passion, contribution, individualism and perseverance.

And honestly, I really think that characterizes who we are as a company incredibly well. Outside of the offerings of the geospatial side of the house provides, we’re a multi-disciplinary, nation-wide engineering firm who does architecture, construction, planning, surveying. We made that specialty in QC early on. But now we focus on innovation. We focus on our clients. We’re a very client-focused company. When you ask, how does being a family business impact you? I think that’s the big part of it, is we are, you know, in the second generation of Dewberry’s running Dewberry. And we have a board of directors that is independent and brings in that diverse kind of market-based leadership for the last 20 years.

But it allows us to really focus our energy and efforts on our clients and the communities around them, right. That’s who we want to be, right. We are client-focused. We’re driven by the concerns and the needs of those clients. And when we do our work we always have that as part of our mindset. It isn’t focused on other things. It’s focused on doing a good job and doing something that is meaningful for that community.

So on the geospatial side, when we talk about specialties, I think we’re a very innovative company. We’re doing a lot in the worlds of deep learning and machine learning. And we’re working through automation, and we’re trying to use creative ways to solve problems. That’s how we focus our energy and efforts within the company. And so as a whole being focused on that, it means we’re driving towards those innovative and high quality solutions to whatever challenge our clients throw at us. And if that’s on the geospatial side, certainly I’m involved with that. But that’s also on the engineering and architecture and surveying and other sides of the house. As you said, it’s a 2500 person firm.

One quick example is, the original National Enhanced Elevation Assessment that was done for USGS and NOAA and others that led to 3DEP. The entire 3D elevation program kind of centered around that return on investment and that collaborative effort to look at all of the state’s partners, federal agencies, communities to define what the uses of lidar would be and the ROI on that investment for our country. We’ve done that again with the 3D nation study to say how does that lidar change and elevation data change as we move forward looking in the next five, ten years? And that’s I think really what we specialize in, right, is that creative, innovative and collaborative environment for work.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Thank you. I think that certainly helps my understanding. Also this spirit of curiosity and innovation, I’ve seen that both in the writings of your colleague Al Karlin, but also in my personal, one-on-one conversations with him. I can see that.

Josh Novac: Yeah, it’s a big part of who we are.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Right, well, for a long time Dewberry didn’t have its own data acquisition capabilities. But a few years ago it purchased a CZMIL SuperNova deep-water lidar sensor from Teledyne Geospatial. You’ve also got a couple of high-end RIEGL sensors. You don’t fly them in your own aircraft though do you? Tell us a bit about these operations.

Josh Novac: It was definitely a change for us moving from a sort of sensory agnostic approach to owning sensors but, you know, for a lot of years, right. Lidar systems were constantly changing, and if you stayed ahead of what that curve was you were replacing sensors fairly often or really trying to push the envelope for what sensors would be. And so early on by not owning those sensors it enabled us to stay on the cutting edge of where the technology was, both in terms of topographic lidar, but also as topobathymetric lidar systems came on the market.

And then we got to experience the majority of different sensors and manufacturers and how they worked, the pros and cons of those sensors. And really allowed us to look at not only traditional lidar but Geiger-mode and single-photon and then like I said, all those topobathymetric sensors as they came online. So it was really a benefit early on for us to not own those sensors, since it allowed us to really see what the market was going to do.

And as the technological process has kind of slowed down a little bit, it hasn’t certainly stopped and there’s a lot of innovation still happening, but we see high density lidar system that are now able to collect both wide area mapping very efficiently as well as corridors and really high density point clouds efficiently. And it allowed us to then move forward and say, okay well, now is a good time to start entering that ownership market. And like you said, we actually own two Teledyne Optech CZMIL SuperNovas now in 880G from RIEGL for another topobathymetric.

So we have three topobathymetric sensors and a RIEGL VQ-1560 II-S for the topographic side. And by doing that now we’re able to provide those services and make sure that our technological line up is stable enough that we can provide those services for many years. It doesn’t take away from the fact that we still want to be innovative and creative in our solutions, and we’ll always find the best sensor to meet the project, even if it’s not something that we own.

But it did change our dynamic a little bit internally. Prior to owning those sensors we did everything besides that initial process. So we wouldn’t process the positional information off the aircraft that POSPac, things like that. We wouldn’t take it through (sounds like: right) process, for example. They get it from 2A point cloud from their internal system storage. We do that now. But everything else after that we did. We did calibration. We did the lidar data processing for classification. We did breaklines. We did final product delivery.

So it was really a natural progression into that market to say, okay well, now the difference is we have to own them. And our operators sit in the aircraft, so they’re Dewberry operators. We have a team that travels the country pretty constantly, from Florida to Alaska. They’re in different areas all the time. And we’re able to manage that a little bit more efficiently than we used to be able to do and really have that insight into where we can save costs and time and effort and control a little bit more of that workflow. Which has really enabled us to then be more creative on the processing side of, you know, how do we store this data? How do we extract more information from it than just ground and non-ground?

Dr. Stewart Walker: You mentioned them flying around the country gave me a segue into my next question which is that you’re in the Denver office. Now does Dewberry work geographically in some sense of local projects? Or do you focus certain functionality or capabilities in certain offices?

Josh Novac: You know, it’s probably a bit of both. So Dewberry as a whole, right, I think we always tried to focus on the fact that we are a series of local offices and with that local knowledge and center of expertise, right. Especially on the engineering side, it’s critically important that you have people who understand the environment and the work around the geographic area that they do business.

And so a lot of our offices are built like that, where we have engineering and architecture, and we do that really local kind of work. But we’re backed by that much, much larger company and expertise that comes with it. So on the geospatial side we are fairly well spread out. We have main offices in Tampa, Florida and Fairfax, Virginia. And that’s where the bulk of our team sits. I do sit in Denver. Jen, who runs our operations sits in Denver. We have around three or four other people that sit in Denver as well. And that grows sort of organically.

But our goal is to find experts, right, at least on the geospatial side. It doesn’t really matter necessarily where they sit as long as they can do the work and be collaborative. The change in work from home environment and things like that has obviously over time caused us to change and rethink how we do business. But in general we like to have that culture of creativity and innovation. Sometimes you need people together, right, to do that. And so we do try to focus our efforts on having folks in locations where they can get together, speak to each other, be innovative and creative, solve problems and get to know one another and build those relationships with their teammates as well. So we are geographic in one sense. We’re nation-wide in another. But we do work pretty much everywhere.

Dr. Stewart Walker: And now for a word from our sponsor, LAStools.

The LIDAR Magazine Podcast is brought to you by rapidlasso. Our LAStools software suite offers the fastest and most memory efficient solution for batch-scripted multi-core lidar processing. Watch as we turn billions of lidar points into useful products at blazing speeds with impossibly low memory requirements. For seamless processing of the largest datasets, we also offer our BLAST extension. Visit rapidlasso.de for details.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Josh, I’ve just finished reading a book called 25¢ Piano Lessons. It’s the self-published autobiography of David Maune, one of the biggest names in North American lidar. It came out at the end of last year. I think it’s an honest description of his long life. It’s full of major accomplishments. The book’s written honestly, it’s from the heart. It makes for a compelling read, but there are passages in it that are a little difficult in some ways. Now David mentions you and your wife Jen. He describes your son Jack as his honorary grandson. He also mentioned a former colleague of mine Mark Saffron, who provides a poetic encomium at the end of the book. Josh, I know Dave a bit, and it was my privilege to present him with the Lidar Leader Award for outstanding personal achievement back in 2018. He was your colleague, and I think he now describes himself as “retired but on call”. Please tell us a bit more about Dave and your relationship with him.

Josh Novac: Yeah, Dave is incredible. He really was such an important part of our careers, and I don’t just mean mine, right. Both mine and Jen’s and really our family’s life as a whole. I met Dave almost 20 years ago. I was working at a different company before Dewberry. But we were working on a project together and was blown away by, not only his knowledge but his honesty, his compassion for the work that we do. His humility for working with others and giving credit to junior people on the Dewberry team and things like that.

If I talk about my relationship with Dave it’s really – I’ve tried to emulate Dave in the best possible way in terms of building my career around those same values of being honest with what we can and can’t do. Of being compassionate about the work that we take on. It’s super interesting work, right, and it’s meaningful in a lot of ways. It’s not just points on a screen. It’s meaningful information and data that can be used to help communities in so many different ways.

And it’s really important work that we’re doing. It’s a baseline of information that didn’t exist before lidar really took front and center in terms of elevation data. And that humility with which to honor those around you. We can’t talk about Dewberry – we can’t talk about Dave without talking about the fact that we all work with a tremendous group of people. He’s inspiring, right, in a lot of ways. And as you read the book you see all of the things that he’s done in his life to contribute to the greater good of society as a whole, be it his time at the army or at Dewberry. And it’s something I really aspire to do. He’s just an incredible human being, and he is – he’s my son’s honorary grandfather and Jen’s honorary father. And we’re super close, and it’s just been a – he’s been such a good mentor and friend throughout the 20 years of my career. But it’s not possible Stewart to say everything about him in a few minutes, other than I recommend that people read the book and learn about the history of our industry a little bit and learn about kind of what it took to get this all going and what it means to do it now.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Well, listeners can find the book on Amazon, and I’ll put a short review of the book into LIDAR magazine. So Josh, tell us a little bit if you want about one or two of the projects that you’re working on at the moment.

Josh Novac: Yeah, happy to. I’ll put on some of my technology hat that I wear here too. And I have a handful of things to just kind of highlight. Obviously the topobathymetric lidar is a huge undertaking for us. So owning three sensors and especially the 2D deep-water sensors and the supernovas are enabling us to see things in the water column and at the bathymetric surface, bottom surface that we’ve really not been able to do before.

One project is that photo C4 mapping initiative where we’re mapping huge areas of the Gulf and really getting down – the goal was originally to get down to a 20 meter contour below the surface with it. But we were finding—and I think others are finding—that in some of these areas with these new sensors we’re able to get a lot deeper. And in a lot of areas we’re getting to 40 meters on the bathymetric bottom.

But being able to do that is an incredible undertaking. We talk about it in some of the presentations that we’ve given over the last year. But it’s a massive amount of data. That project alone is 4.5 petabytes of raw data coming off the sensor that we have to duplicate to LAS point clouds and wave forms and then process to extra points from the wave forms. And it’s an incredibly complex and challenging project, but will have such a meaningful impact to the state of Florida moving forward.

But very, very cool and learning from that of how we change how we do topobathymetric lidar processing from that big wide area deep water to then rivarine environments has also presented really unique and interesting challenges that we’ve been facing for the last two years or so. But have really made a lot of progress on how those sensors can model the environment.

Another one that I’ve personally been invested in for about five years is, we’ve developed a deep learning model that extracts area hydrographic features down to a tenth of an acre or less. Very, very narrow streams. And we’ve deployed it in some of the most challenging environments in the country, coastal Louisiana and the Everglades. And so when we took on this challenge we decided not to just go somewhere easy and say, oh, we have a bunch of really nice lakes and ponds and rivers that are easy to see.

We took it on and said, well, let’s try this in coastal Louisiana where we’re going to have tens of thousands of miles of bank. Recently I gave a presentation on this at GeoWeek titled, “Using Deep Learning to Extract Areas of Complex Hydrography Using Only Airborne and Topographic Lidar“. And it’s a long descriptive title, but it really went into, what are the pros and cons of these approaches? How do we actually leverage deep learning and innovations and artificial intelligence to understand the world around us and explicitly do that from lidar? Not taking in other temporally different datasets, like imagery and things like that. But how do we manage lidar and manage the environment around it to say, this is what I think is here and predict that this is water, predict that this is land or predict that it’s a building or a tree or whatever, right? That the sort of uses become endless once you start talking about segmentation and how you visualize that environment.

It’s an incredibly interesting project as it has impacted the way we work. And so we’re deploying it now in Mississippi where we just are finishing up flying two thirds of the state on the Mississippi River, but also in that area of complex hydrography as you get to the Gulf Coast. But it’s sort of that pivot, right, of an entryway of how we start to see our work change and develop over time. And it kind of feeds into the last program that I’ve been really excited to work on over the last few years is, the 3D Hydrography Program (3DHP) for USGS.

The usefulness, right, the impact of improved hydrography for this country, just it can’t be overstated. We had the NHD, and that varied from state to state, from region to region and had a lot of meaningful input in there. And taking that and saying, okay well, now we’re going to derive it from the elevation data that we’ve spent 3DEP collecting, is incredibly useful. Not just for, hey, this is better data or more accurate to the elevation. But once it’s more accurate to the elevation you can start to see how you use that for flood mitigation strategies, for storm water management. And these natural flow lines are so critical to communities around the country to understand the unbuilt environment around them.

If you have mountains next door and let’s say you’re in California and you had a fire, how does that change how much water is going to come down off those mountains during snow melt and then move into your built system, right? These are things that a program like 3DHP can start to help answer by giving baseline data around those communities and through those communities for the natural drainage to take. And then being able to incorporate that into so many more engineering programs and projects moving forward. So it’s a small snapshot of the work we do at Dewberry with 120 people working on this day in and day out. But we’re always trying to take that strategy of innovation and then tying that to how communities long-term can use that data.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, well, you’re certainly bringing it closer to my home. Sadly the people of Los Angeles need exactly that kind of information. They’re already seeing the need for that kind of information now. I hope this question is not too difficult. Dewberry’s family owned, so its financials are not in the public sector. Can you say anything – are revenues growing? Are profits growing? Is the workforce growing?

Josh Novac: These are great questions and yeah, you’d think as a family-owned and private company I wouldn’t have a ton to say. But I actually do. And one of the things that I love about Dewberry and the culture around it is we do post our annual revenue and a lot of other metrics around our growth and overall make up of a company annually. We do it in a corporate social responsibility report, which is available on our website Dewberry.com. We do an annual review every year where we also show and highlight interesting and innovative projects around Dewberry. Because again, we cover a lot of different markets.

And they’re really interesting to be able to see what Dewberry does and understand the breadth of the services that we offer. But to your actual question of, you know, what are the revenues? Are we healthy? So we’re ranked number 31 in the ENR, which is the Engineering News Record of top 500 design firms. So it’s a growing and innovative and big company. We have 60 offices across the country, and we had $683 million in revenue in 2024.

And what I can tell you is having spent 18 years at Dewberry, we are constantly growing. We’re healthy. The workforce is growing, and the technologies and skill sets are changing. The type of employee that we have, especially on the geospatial side changes over time. So we have folks that are geographers and cartography majors. But we also have computer scientists, and we have data analysts and we have this big group of people that kind of come together to really form what spatial data and geospatial data are becoming as we look forward to the next ten years of spatial data in this country and how important that is. Our firm has really navigated that fairly well and have been bringing in those different ideas and backgrounds to build programs and processes that really work for our clients.

Dr. Stewart Walker: It’s come across in our conversation that you do a great deal of work for federal government agencies like USGS and clearly for perhaps state government, local government. To what extent are you a defense contractor?

Josh Novac: Yeah, Dewberry has a lot of contracts with federal agencies. That certainly includes those around the DOD space. On the geospatial side, we support a lot of different contracts and work. I’m not the best person to answer exactly how much DOD (Department of Defense) work Dewberry does. But we certainly are engaged in that community and support those agencies as well.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Let’s look forward now as we close the podcast. So how would you characterize the way that Dewberry’s changing at the moment? How are its geospatial activities changing, and what are your goals for the remainder of this year and the years to come?

Josh Novac: So the shorter answer is a lot. There’s a whole lot that’s changing, right. We are in a dynamic field. Geospatial science is constantly changing, and remote sensing is constantly changing. And the way people utilize the spatial data is constantly changing. Be it from in the healthcare industry of tracking how viruses spread across the country, to lidar mapping and doing hydrography and hydrology. It’s such an interesting and dynamic world that we get to live in.

And I think if we’re honest, I think the future looks incredible. From Dewberry’s perspective I’m surrounded by incredible people. And so my personal future with Dewberry looks incredible because it is about the people that work on this data. But as a whole and as we look at the country and how spatial data integrates with everything we do, we all like to know where we are on our Google Maps. We all like to understand am I going to get flooded? Or how will a fire impact landslide risk in my neighborhood? These are answers that geospatial data solves. These are questions that geospatial data solves.

It’s so important to constantly be able to innovate and be able to adjust what we do. For the longest time we were so focused on 3DEP, and we’re still focused on 3DEP, right. It was two points per square meter and now it’s going to be eight points per square meter or more. But we’re also now focused on how do we take that data, that base-level data and make more information out of it that’s meaningful to the communities? That’s 3DHP. That’s 3D building models, right, and 3D cities.

And I think it’s going to be really interesting to continue to watch how our industry changes and grows with the times to reflect what the modern world needs in terms of spatial data components and how we are able to provide that information. So I think it’s a really bright future for the industry as a whole. You asked what my goals were for the remainder of the year. Honestly, I love to support my clients, my community and the people that I work with on a daily basis. And I’m very much looking forward to continuing to just do that and grow as we have been through meaningful work to our clients.

Dr. Stewart Walker: I have to say that in those sentences both your passion and your compassion shine through. So Josh Novac, thank you very much indeed. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I’m very grateful you were able to participate in the LIDAR magazine podcast. We wish you well with your demanding role, the challenge of steering part of Dewberry in the highly competitive geospatial services world with all the great talent that the company has.

Josh Novac: Thank you Stewart. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on here to talk today.

Dr. Stewart Walker: I’m sure listeners will similarly have enjoyed your comments today.

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