Abstract
Growth in the publication of scientific articles is occurring at an exponential rate, prompting a growing need to synthesise information in a timely manner to combat urgent environmental problems and guide future research. Here, we undertake a topic analysis of dryland literature over the last 75 years (8218 articles) to identify areas in arid ecology that are well studied and topics that are emerging. Four topics—wetlands, mammal ecology, litter decomposition and spatial modelling, were identified as ‘hot topics’ that showed higher than average growth in publications from 1940 to 2015. Five topics—remote sensing, climate, habitat and spatial, agriculture and soils-microbes, were identified as ‘cold topics’, with lower than average growth over the survey period, but higher than average numbers of publications. Topics in arid ecology clustered into seven broad groups on word-based similarity. These groups ranged from mammal ecology and population genetics, broad-scale management and ecosystem modelling, plant ecology, agriculture and ecophysiology, to populations and paleoclimate. These patterns may reflect trends in the field of ecology more broadly. We also identified two broad research gaps in arid ecology: population genetics, and habitat and spatial research. Collaborations between population genetics and ecologists and investigations of ecological processes across spatial scales would contribute profitably to the advancement of arid ecology and to ecology more broadly.
Highlights
A goal of each discipline in science is to integrate knowledge to achieve progressively deeper understanding of the natural world
From 25 topic areas and using 8218 articles in the literature on arid ecology, Latent Dirichlet Allocation identified topics ranging from soils, litter decomposition, plant and mammal ecology to ecosystem and population-scale ecology and biology (S1 Table)
Over the past 75 years, topics studied in dryland or arid ecology have ranged from soils, litter decomposition, plant and mammal ecology, to population and ecosystem-scale ecology
Summary
A goal of each discipline in science is to integrate knowledge to achieve progressively deeper understanding of the natural world. With the exponential growth in scientific publications [1, 2], there is a growing need to synthesise information in a timely manner. We have entered the era of ‘big data’ and, with the recent development of new statistical techniques, researchers can summarise information and identify past and future trends in research topics with increasing ease. The diminishing worldwide allocation of resources for natural science [3] presents an increasing imperative to identify ’important’ topics that bear on fundamental understanding of the natural world.
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