Vysotskh, Georgii

Born Feb. 7 (19), 1865, in the village of Nikitovka, Chernigov Province; died June 6, 1940, in Kharkov. Soviet soil scientist, silviculturist, botanist, and physical geographer; academician of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1934) and the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1939).

Vysotskii graduated from the St. Petersburg Agricultural Academy in 1890. From 1892 to 1904 he worked in the Velikii Anadol’ Forest Tract as a member of an expedition led by V. V. Dokuchaev. He was a professor at the Crimean University (1919-22), the Byelorussian Agricultural Institute (1923-26), and the Kharkov Institute of Agriculture and Forestry (1926-30). From 1930 to 1940 he was a professor at the Ail-Union (later Ukrainian) Research Institute of Forestry and Land and Forest Reclamation in Kharkov. Vysotskii studied forest-growing conditions in the Tula area of felled trees, the Buzuluk pine forest, the Ergeni Hills, and the Aleshkov and Naryn sands. He did research on the influence of forests on the environment and the reasons for the lack of forests on the steppes, and he was the first to calculate the moisture balance in forests and fields. Vysotskii scientifically substantiated the tree-shrub type of steppe forest. He laid the foundation for soil hydrology in arid regions and developed the study of types of water regimes of soil and ground. He advanced a theory on the origin of the salinity of steppe soils and ground. Vysotskii was the first to describe the gleying process and demonstrate its biological character. He worked out the principles for the oroclimatic classification of soils, and he was the first to discover the patterns of the ground air currents responsible for dust storms. Vysotskii proposed a plant classification according to forms of vegetative reproduction. He was the author of a physicogeographical monograph on the Samara Appanage District (1908-09) and the Ergeni Hills (1915).