Dr. Geoff Henebry

Geoff Henebry
  • Professor
  • Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences
  • Center for Global Change and Earth Observations
  • Manly Miles Building 1405 S. Harrison Rd, Room 206b, East Lansing, MI 48823
  • or
  • Geography Building, 673 Auditorium, Room 216, East Lansing, MI 48824
  • (517) 355-3899

BIOGRAPHY

Since 2019 I have been a Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences and the Center for Global Change and Earth Observations at Michigan State University. I’m a broadly trained environmental scientist specializing in interdisciplinary research. I earned my graduate degrees in Environmental Sciences from the University of Texas at Dallas in the penultimate decade of the last century. In graduate school I also met my wife, Ana Braga-Henebry, who hails from Brazil. In 1989 we moved north so I could serve as a postdoctoral research associate with the Konza Prairie Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project at Kansas State University from 1989-1996. During this time I became very interested in the use of remote sensing to understand the spatiotemporal interplay of environmental patterns and processes. From September 1993 through February 1994, I was a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow at the Instituto National de Pesquisas Espacias (INPE) in São José dos Campos, Brazil, where I worked with time series of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to monitor flooding dynamics in the Pantanal Matogrossense. From 1996-1999 I was Assistant Professor of Landscape Ecology at Rutgers University-Newark. My family and I took the opportunity to return to the Great Plains in 1999 by joining the Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies (CALMIT) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as an Associate Geoscientist and Research Associate Professor in the School of Natural Resources. In 2005 we moved yet farther north to South Dakota State University (SDSU) as a part of a cluster hire to form a center of excellence focused on terrestrial remote sensing that worked jointly with the USGS Center for EROS.  In 2011 I stepped to serve as the Co-Director of the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence at SDSU and a Professor of Natural Resource Management. During 2018-2019, I was a John A. Hannah Distinguished Visiting Professor at MSU. I am very pleased to work at the pioneer land grant university that embraces international research as central to its mission.

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rli982AAAAAJ&hl=en 

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8999-2709 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research interests are broad, but a recurrent theme is the use of remote sensing and geospatial technologies to study environmental patterns and processes, including quantitative analysis and modeling of land surface phenology and land cover land use change. I’ve studied land dynamics in North, Central, and South America, Eastern Europe, European Russia, and Central Asia, and in a variety of landscapes, including grasslands and croplands, drylands and wetlands, and cities and urbanizing areas. I have enjoyed multiple international collaborations and field campaigns. Through the years, I have mentored: (1) doctorate students from Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, The Netherlands, The Philippines, Poland, Ukraine, and Vietnam, (2) masters students from Czechia and the USA, and (3) post-doctoral research associates from China, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, The Netherlands, The Philippines, Poland, and the USA. I am currently a member of two NASA Science Teams: Land Cover Land Use Change (LCLUC) and Biological Diversity and Ecological Conservation (BDEC). My research has received support through the years from NASA, NSF, NIH, DOE, USGS, NRC, and NATO as well as data grants from various international space agencies. I am currently an Associate Editor of Remote Sensing of Environment (since 2018) and serve on three other editorial boards of International Journal of Biometeorology (since 2012), Landscape Ecology (since 2007), and Science of Remote Sensing (since 2019). Previously I served on the editorial boards of Conservation Ecology (1996-2003), Ecology/Ecological Monographs (2001-2007), BioScience (2003-2018), Ecology & Society (2004-2008), Applied Vegetation Science (2008-2011), and Land (2020-2021). I am active in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the North America Chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE-NA).