A Bibliometric Analysis of Urban Ecosystem Services: Structure, Evolution, and Prospects

Abstract

Urban areas are human–environmental systems that rely heavily on ecosystems for long-term sustainability, and ecosystems and their components are essential to city life. Previous reviews have drawn a range of conclusions relevant to the future analysis and implementation of ecological and facility assessments. Overall, however, there is still a need to develop more systematic methods to comprehensively assess and evaluate urban ecosystem services (UES) in a temporal dimension for use in both historical monitoring studies and prospective research. Using CiteSpace, this study assessed the history and current state of UES research from multiple angles, as well as identified research structures and emerging trends in this field. The main findings are as follows: (i) The study of UES can be divided into three distinct but interconnected stages: preparation, rise, and prosperity. There are substantial prospects for UES research to develop worldwide collaborative networks, since it is increasingly expanding from domains focused on ecological or environmental science to those that draw from a wider range of disciplines. (ii) UES has evolved slowly from large-scale research to more focused, smaller-scale studies. Research on the subject of UES focuses primarily on two primary areas: land-use change and the development of green infrastructure. (iii) Sustainability in cities is currently a hot issue, and an important area of this study is the role that urban ecosystem services plays in ensuring residents’ health and happiness.