George R. Hendrey

George Hendrey is currently Distinguished Professor, ESA-Certified Senior Ecologist, formerly Chair of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Queens College of the City University of New York. His teaching emphasizes understanding Earth as a complex and dynamic system and focusing on perturbation of the system by human activity.

George’s formal training is in civil engineering water resources (MS) and limnology (PhD), so throughout his career he has taken an engineering perspective into environmental research.  Early in his career he worked on the consequences of acid deposition during which he established multi-investigator limnology field labs in Norway and in the Adirondack Mountains of NY. Prior to his appointment at CUNY/Queens, George was Head of the Earth Systems Sciences Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory where he envisioned and led development of Free-Air CO₂ Enrichment (FACE) technology. FACE has been used by hundreds of scientists and students in many types of ecosystems, from desert to forest, to evaluate the ecological consequences if increasing atmospheric CO₂ and climate warming. His more recent research fits within the broad topic of climate change, particularly on the interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere with increasing atmospheric CO₂. Since coming to CUNY he has collaborated with many others on analysis of data relating to climate change and its effects on forests and the potential strong, positive feedbacks that may accelerate the rate of global warming.

As VP and CTO of COAWAY LLC he worked on an industrial method for direct extraction of CO₂ from the atmosphere and was selected as one of 9 finalists in the $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge.

With over 160 research publications in the peer-reviewed literature, and over 200 other contributions to science, his research has had a significant impact internationally as indicated by citation indices: h-score of 46, RG score of 40, putting him the top 3% of scientists whose work has been seminal.

REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS (Last Ten Years):

1. Calfapietra C, Ainsworth EA, Beier C, DeAngelis P, Ellsworth DS, Godbold DL, Hendrey GR, Hickler T, Hoosbeek MR, Karnosky DF, King J, Ko¨rner C, Leakey ADB, Lewin KF, Liberloo M, Long SP, Lukac M, Matyssek R, Miglietta F, Nagy J, Norby RJ, Oren R, Percy KE, Rogers A, Scarascia-Mugnozza G,Stitt M, Taylor G, Ceulemans R. 2010. Challenges in elevated CO₂ experiments on forests. Trends in Plant Science 15(1):5-10. 

2. Yi C, Rustic G, Xu X, Wang J, Dookie A, Wei S, Hendrey G, Ricciuto D, Meyers T, Pinter K, Nagy Z, 2012. Climate extremes and grassland potential productivity. Environmental Research Letters 3:035703 (http://stacks.iop.org/ERL/7/035703 [stacks.iop.org]). 

3. Yi C, Ricciuto, Hendrey GR. 2013 Biome Q10 and dryness. American Journal of Climate Change 2: 292-295.

4. Wei S, Yi , Hendrey G, Eaton T, Rustic G, Wang S, Liu H, Krakauer NK, Wang W, Desai A, Leonardo Y,Montagnani, Kyaw Tha Paw U, Matthias Falk, Andrew Black, Christian Bernhofer, Thomas Grünwald, Tuomas Laurila, Alessandro Cescatti, Eddy Moors, Rosvel Bracho and Riccardo Valentini. 2014.  Data-based perfect-deficit approach to understanding climate extremes and forest carbon assimilation capacity. Environ. Res. Lett. 9.

5. Talhelm Alan F., Kurt S. Pregitzer, Mark E. Kubiske, Donald R. Zak, Courtney E. Campany, Andrew J. Burton, Richard E. Dickson, George R. Hendrey, J. G. Isebrands, Keith F. Lewin, John Nagy and David F. Karnosky 2014. Elevated carbon dioxide and ozone alter productivity and ecosystem carbon content in northern temperate forests [onlinelibrary.wiley.com]. Global Change Biology  20 (8):2492-2504   doi: 10.1111/gcb.12564.

6. Yi C, Wei S, Hendrey G. 2014. Warming climate extends dryness-controlled areas of terrestrial carbon sequestration. Science Reports 4, 5472; DOI:10.1038/srep04572 (2014).

7. Wei S, `Yi C, Fang W, Hendrey G. 2017 A Global Study of GPP Focusing on Light Use Efficiency in a Random Forest Regression Model. Ecosphere DOI:10.1002/ecs2.1724.

8. Kutter, E, Yi C, Hendrey G, Liu H, Eaton T, Ni-Meister W. 2017. Recirculation over complex Terrain. J.Geophys. Res.  Atmospheres. DOI: 10.1002/2016JD026409.

9. Yi C, Mu G, Hendrey G, Vicente-Serrano SM, Fang W, Zhou T, SGao1 S, Xu1 P. 2018 Bifurcated Response of a Regional Forest to Draught. Expert Opin Environ Biol 7:2 DOI: 10.4172/2325-9655.1000153.

10. Xu P, Zhou T, Yi C, Fang W, Hendrey G, Zhao X. 2018. Forest drought resistance distinguished by canopy height. Environ. Res. Lett.13(2018) 075003https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aacadd [doi.org].

11.  Xu P, Fang W, Zhou T, Xiang X, Luo H, Hendrey G,Yi C. 2019. Spatial Upscaling of Tree-Ring-Based Forest Response to Drought with Satellite Data 2019 Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 2344; doi:10.3390/rs11202344.

SYNERGISTIC ACTIVITIES (Last Ten Years):

• Modeling US Tree Mortality from Regional to Continental Scales (Internal grant, with C. Yi)

• Workshop on US Forest Resilience and Tipping Points: Managing Tomorrow’s Forests (Co- convener and organizer with C. Yi, proposal pending)

• Agricultural application of CO2 in open-filed cropping

• Methods for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and flue gas