Georgy Vysotsky

Georgy Nikolaevich (or Mykolayovych) Vysotsky (Russian: Гео́ргий Никола́евич Высо́цкий; Ukrainian: Георгій Миколайович Висоцький, romanized: Heorhii Mykolaiovych Vysotskyi; 7 February 1865 – 6 April 1940) was a Ukrainian and Soviet soil scientist and forester who worked in the steppe, where he examined forest growth and the effects of soil factors.

Vysotsky was born in Nikitovka and went to the St. Petersburg Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in 1886, where he came under the influence of Vasily Dokuchaev and Georgy Fedorovich Morozov.

There, he experimented on the use of forest strips to manage droughts.

A major contribution was his approach to measuring the moisture balance of forests, which has been modified and goes by the name of Vysotsky-Ivanov moisture coefficient defined as the ratio of the annual precipitation to the annual evaporation.

[1] In 1915 he received the Semenov-Tian-Shanskyi gold medal from the Russian geographical society.