Search

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.

The aim of this article is to analyse the accommodation of Estonian geographical science into that of the Soviet Union after World War II. The process is viewed in the context of scientific and pol...

Church towers are among the most prominent features of landscape and contain both significant architectural and symbolic value. Religion and its various beliefs and ideologies bring symbolism and meaning into the everyday lives of people. This geographical study deals with the iconography of church towers, looking closer into their regional distribution pattern and analyzing their connotation within the former territory of Old Livonia (now encompassed by present-day Estonia and present-day Latvia, except for Latgale) and within the European religious context. The analysis of the distribution pattern of church tower symbols in Estonia shows significant regional variance. In the former Province of Estonia, governed by Tallinn, the cross is a dominant symbol on church towers, whereas the use of the cockerel is more widespread in the former Province of Livonia, the historic capital of which was Riga. A third historical region of Livonia, Kurland (governed by Jelgava), shares similarities in church tower symbo...

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.

The study analysed the seasonality of foreign tourists’ space consumption in Estonia using mobile positioning dataset with anonymous roaming data. The method which uses mobile phone positioning coordinates in space–time movement studies in Estonia is called the social positioning method. The dataset allowed analysis of the distribution of foreigners’ country of origin in Estonia with the precision of network cells of mobile operators. Privacy of mobile phone holders was guaranteed according to EU regulation. It was concluded that seasonality produces very different and sometimes even opposite tourists’ space consumption patterns in Estonia. Coastal areas are popular for summer tourism and not so popular in winter; continental inland areas were used more for winter tourism. The popular summer tourism areas along the Baltic Sea beaches are dominated by one nationality: the Finnish in western Estonia, and the Russians in eastern Estonia. Latvians made up a higher percentage in Saaremaa and Parnu during summer and in Otepaa and Lake Peipsi in winter. The mobile positioning data have great potential for tourism studies and monitoring, but is a sensitive issue due to the fear of surveillance.

Cemeteries are not just burial sites. They mirror the development of a society and carry identity value. The way cemeteries are located and arranged may suggest former administrative boundaries, population dynamic s and other aspects of past life. This article gives an overview of civic cemeteries in Estonia, focusing mainly on the determinants of location pattern of burial places since the end of the eighteenth century. The principal aim is to provide a comprehensive database and typology of Estonian cemeteries based on historic and religious characteristics. As a result of the analysis of location criteria a number of key factors determining the network of cemeteries were detected. The se included legislation, administrative division, religion, regional economic peculiarities, population movements, and traditions.

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.

The reverence for places (e.g., religious sites) cherished by native people is increasingly being disturbed and replaced by more pragmatic notions and purposes, mostly connected to tourism. How does this change influence the identity of a place? In order to demonstrate the possible effect of such a turn, we looked at the example of churches on Saaremaa Island — the biggest island of Estonia, situated on the west coast (see Figure 1). We studied the ransformation of religious sites, from their symbolic roles in the past to their contemporary roles.

The cattle breeds that have been exploited in European countries have evolved through centuries. The characteristics of specific breeds have been determined by their habitation, i.e. by the surrounding natural and geographical environment. This determined the nutrition, the anatomic features, the milk yield, the fat content in milk, the muscle mass etc. The present article will show that in addition to the natural conditions also administrative division may lead to different cattle breeds being bred on a territory with relatively similar vegetation as well as climatic, geographic and demographic conditions. One of such territories is the area inhabited by Estonians that became a part of the Russian Empire in 1721 as the Provinces of Estonia and Livonia (the Northern part of the latter). The province was unified after the February revolution in 1917, and in 1918 the Republic of Estonia was born. The insight into the history of cattle breeding in Estonia, illustrated by distribution maps of main cattle breeds, will show that even today these administrative boundaries that ceased to exist long ago, still ha ve an impact on cattle breeding in Estonia.