The water resources of the European and Asian parts of Russia (respectively EPR and APR) are considered in comparison with the all-Russian and world indicators. The specific water availability of the both parts of the country is 1.4 times lower than the global one. In per capita terms, the water availability of the APR is much higher than the EPR. In recent decades, in most parts of Russia, the river runoff is higher than the norm. Analysis of data on reservoirs indicates that their total power storage in the APR is almost 1.3 times greater than in the EPR. Generation of electricity at the Asian hydroelectric power stations is 70 % of the total Russian, but the degree of hydraulic regulation of flow in the European part is much higher. The water use pattern and its dynamics have been revealed, showing significant changes after the collapse of the USSR. Both in the EPR and APR water consumption has decreased by now almost twice. The water use efficiency per unit of the gross regional product in the Asian part of the country is almost one and a half times higher than in the European one. It is shown that the anthropogenic impact on the river runoff and the water quality in the EPR is much greater than in the APR, although in some regions the situation differs in many respects from that which takes place in the EPR and APR as a whole.

The paper discusses hazards associated with river activities: channel processes including bank erosion during river channel lateral migration, accelerated incision or aggradation, movement of sandy ridges of riffles and riffle-pool systems, blocking of navigation fairways and water intake structures by migrating riffles, destabilization of bridges and other structures in river channels caused by erosion associated with pool deformations. For small rivers hazards associated with channel siltation or catastrophic aggradation are also considered. Additional hazards on valley slopes are associated with potentially dangerous slope processes such as rockfalls, landslides, rockslides, which can be triggered by channel erosion. Geographic distribution of the listed types of hazards associated with river channel processes is considered for all Federal Regions of Russia. Regularities of their territorial distribution and spatial patterns are discussed. Mapping of hazardous channel processes was carried out for the entire territory of Russia. Regioning of the Russian territory based on results of such mapping is one of the results reported in the paper.

The article is devoted to analytical review of the use of socio-economic groups of countries in methodological support and practical work of major international organizations - the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. Despite the long practice of using the «geographic dimension» of global development it has not taken the necessary place in the toolkit of program management of global and regional development, monitoring of the socio-economic environment. The article discusses the features of the spatial classifications, methods of their creation, application sphere, and current changes. On the basis of time series of data in terms of the regions some tendencies of modern world socio-economic development are analyzed.

The paper deals with analysis of historical rural settlement pattern within the Valdai upland as a part of Derevskaya Pyatina of Novgorod Principality and its transformation during the 16th-17th centuries taking Gorodenskii and Berezaiskii pogosts as examples. Due to the main methodical difficulty such as impossibility of settlements accurate location for the end of the 15th century, we made not a deterministic, but probabilistic, modeling of the settlement pattern using Markov (Poisson) process and Poisson distribution. Empirical testing demonstrated that the rural settlement pattern in general corresponds to Poisson law, in case of uniform nature and socio-economic environment. It should be mentioned that when the settlement pattern changed from few-household to multi-household, but much more sparse, concordance with Poisson law had been maintained, though the agrarian development of the territory was substantially reduced.

Interest in the achievements of Russian landscape geographers emerged only after the Second World War. From this time the contacts of Soviet geographers with foreign colleagues have begun. These contacts were of different nature due to political and ideological factors. The cooperation with the geographers of the socialist countries, especially German Democratic Republic, Poland and Czechoslovakia, was the most fruitful. Contacts with geographers from the countries of the Western bloc were more limited and one-sided. The greatest interest in Soviet geography originated in the United States. Since 1960 in this country monthly journal «Soviet geography» had been published; for 30 years hundreds of articles of Soviet geographers were published there in English.

Coastal lagoons (as well as lakes) play the role of biogeochemical filters reducing the nutrient load to the Baltic Sea. The estimates of retention of nutrients were made for the «lagoon-catchment» systems of the Curonian and Vistula lagoons of the Baltic Sea. Models of IL RAN and IEEP for the year of average precipitation (220 mm/year) gave following values of the emission with river discharge to the lagoons from Russian parts of their catchments: 1780 tN/year h 90 tP/year for the Curonian lagoon and 5970 tN/year and 560 tP/year for the Vistula lagoon, and the natural background emissions are 1030 tN/year and 30 tP/year, 2170 tN/year and 70 tP/year respectively. The first order estimates gave the equal retention for the catchments of the Curonian and Vistula lagoons: 45 % for total nitrogen and 49 % of total phosphorus. The retention capacities of the lagoons themselves are different, the Curonian lagoon is generally more «effective»: the Vistula lagoon is characterized by 28 and 31 % of retention while the Curonian lagoon by 41 and 49 % for the total nitrogen and phosphorus respectively. In total, the retention after «consecutive filtering» of nutrients by a catchment and a lagoon for the Vistula and Curonian lagoons are 55 % and 51, 68 and 74 % for total nitrogen and phosphorus respectively.