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The purpose of this study is to find out how many people died of lightning strikes in Estonia from 1880 to 1940. Data about lighting victims were mostly searched for in digitalised old newspapers. The journalistic reports were verified with the help of death records available in church registers. In addition, the data were verified using official statistics of the period. A total of 497 potential victims were reported from various sources. Of these, 349 deaths were considered reliable. This means that during the observed 61 years, an average of 5.2 people per year died in the Estonian region. As the number of fatalities may be underestimated, the actual number of victims could have been 7–8 per million inhabitants. The annual average number of fatalities remained practically unchanged during the period, but the share of women and deaths in buildings decreased to some degree. The sex and age structure of the victims corresponds well with the respective divisions of an agrarian society. The correlation analysis showed that the relationship between the number of lightning victims and the number of people living in the parish is high, as is the relationship with the area of the parish. However, the correlation with population density and land use is virtually non-existent.

At first glance, Tartu, Estonia (1989 population: 113,000; 2016 population: 97,000) is a typical second-tier city of the Baltic republics, known as a regional centre of south Estonia and a university town. But, during the Soviet occupation of Estonia (1944 to 1991), Tartu gained importance as the home of a massive USSR airbase, taking advantage of Estonia’s physical location on the western periphery of communism as a frontline for air offense or defence. This chapter explores how the Soviet occupation of Estonia transformed the cityscape of Tartu in three ways. Firstly, the socio-economic and demographic composition of the city changed, as Russian-speaking labour was imported (from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine) for employment in the industrial and military spheres. Secondly, new housing estates were built to house the new immigrants in vast master-planned districts—removed from the city centre and traditional neighbourhoods—and disrupting conventional urban density gradients. Thirdly, Tartu was a “closed” city during Soviet times (non-residents could not visit without a permit), and the district surrounding the airbase was subject to even greater security (non-military local residents could not even walk the streets); consequently, the city grew during the decades in a lop-sided fashion as urban development accommodated a high-security and oversize airfield located only 3.5 km from the medieval historic centre of this Hanseatic-merchant town. In late 2016, the new National Museum of Estonia, a high-profile € 46 million project, will be dedicated on one of the airbase runways; the museum is poised to reinvigorate urban development in this part of the city as it draws Estonian and international visitors to a site of remembrance of the Soviet occupation. This research uses demographic analysis, archival documents, and historical imagery to trace the short- and long-term effects of Soviet-era urbanisation in Tartu during the Cold War given Estonia’s uneasy membership in the Communist Bloc.

As a result of the First World War several new nation-states emerged on the map of Europe. One of them was the Republic of Estonia, emerging from the ruins of the Russian Empire. As Estonians had never had their own state before, the establishment of the parliamentary republic, its institutions and a national identity was a big challenge for its small elite. First and foremost, the ambition was to do things differently from the previous rulers. The Estonian economic geographer Edgar Kant played an important role in the development of his country between 1920 and 1940. His geography was politically motivated, innovative and pragmatic as the rapid development of the state required new theories and methods. The methodological basis for Kant's ‘innovative geography’ became Walter Christaller's central place theory, and he was the first in the world to understand the importance of applying it in empirical research, doing so in the 1930s in the reform of Estonian rural municipalities. In September 1944, Edgar Kant fled from Estonia to Lund and Christaller's theory spread more widely through Kant's interactions with Torsten Hagerstrand in Sweden and later Edward Ullman and Brian Berry in the United States. This paper reviews the relatively unknown geography, and the complicated life, of Edgar Kant, who, it is argued, strongly influenced the trajectory of the triumph of the ‘new geography’ in the 1950s. Through this example it will be shown how peripheral actors and places can play key roles in innovation diffusion and intellectual history.

International audience; In the hydrological jargon, the Budyko hypothesis refers to the hypothesis according to which the long- term water and energy balances of the Earth’s surface are largely dependent upon a single aridity ratio u = E x / P (where P represents long-term precipitation [mm/yr] and E x long-term maximum evaporation [mm/yr]). In this historical note, we analyze the contribution of Evald Oldekop (1885–1952), who not only inspired Budyko’s work, but also proposed the concept of maximum catchment evaporation more than three decades before Thornthwaite introduced the concept of potential evapotranspiration.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a powerful greenhouse gas and the main driver of stratospheric ozone depletion. Since soils are the largest source of N2O, predicting soil response to changes in climate or land use is central to understanding and managing N2O. Here we find that N2O flux can be predicted by models incorporating soil nitrate concentration (NO3−), water content and temperature using a global field survey of N2O emissions and potential driving factors across a wide range of organic soils. N2O emissions increase with NO3− and follow a bell-shaped distribution with water content. Combining the two functions explains 72% of N2O emission from all organic soils. Above 5 mg NO3−-N kg−1, either draining wet soils or irrigating well-drained soils increases N2O emission by orders of magnitude. As soil temperature together with NO3− explains 69% of N2O emission, tropical wetlands should be a priority for N2O management., In a global field survey across a wide range of organic soils, the authors find that N2O flux can be predicted by models incorporating soil nitrate concentration (NO3–), water content and temperature. N2O emission increases with NO3– and temperature and follows a bell-shaped distribution with water content.

There is a traditional narrative in Estonia on how oil shale was first mentioned by A. W. Hupel in 1777 and how supposedly, A. J. Gulden- stadt stated in his books that oil shale was discovered near Johvi in 1725. However, from historical literature and archival documents the authors of the present research found no evidence to prove these statements of the narrative. In this study, it will be specified how oil shale was actually dis- covered on the Kohala estate and first described in 1791.