Abstract
The scientific literature available on deep-sea biodiversity is ample and covers a wide array of objectives, geographic areas and topics. It covers also the exploration of the links between ecosystem functioning and productivity, as well as modelling, management and exploitation. New informatics tools now allow the comprehensive monitoring of the status of deep-sea research, in order to highlight global research topics and their trends, which deserve further development and economic investments. Here, we used a science mapping approach to provide a global and systematic bibliometric synthesis of these current research topics and their trends, in order to identify the size, growth, trajectory, and geographic distribution of scientific efforts, as well as to highlight the emerging topics. A total of 1,287 deep-sea biodiversity publications were retrieved from the Scopus databases from 1993 to the present. Established and emerging research topics were identified: i. biogeochemical, microbial and molecular analyses; ii. biodiversity measures; iii. ecosystems conservation and management; and finally, iv. zoology and taxocoenosis. The temporal change in the research activity (by subdividing publications into 1993-2010 and 2011-2019 blocks) evidenced how the “biogeochemical, microbial and molecular analyses” cluster was not present from 1993 to 2010, since included in the one for “biodiversity measures”, showing emancipation in the following couple of decades. A dominant role in research of US followed by the United Kingdom, Germany and France was evidenced, with China particularly associated to the former.
Highlights
Deep-Sea Biodiversity Knowledge and ExplorationThe deep sea is the largest biome on Earth; 84% of the ocean area is below 2000 m (Costello et al, 2010a; Ramirez-Llodra et al, 2011)
One should notice that PLoS One was created more recently than the others (2006), which highlights its presence in the deep-sea biodiversity research field
Our results indicated that an initial phase of description of deep-sea ecosystems and their functioning occurred in relation to the need to establish biotic indices for the management of human impacts
Summary
Deep-Sea Biodiversity Knowledge and ExplorationThe deep sea (i.e., below 200 m in depth) is the largest biome on Earth; 84% of the ocean area is below 2000 m (Costello et al, 2010a; Ramirez-Llodra et al, 2011). Recent investigations conducted in one of the largest polymetallic fields in the ocean, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the eastern Pacific Ocean, demonstrated that there are major gaps in deep-sea knowledge (Glover et al, 2018; Wiklund et al, 2018; Brix et al, unpublished; Christodoulou et al, 2019), including for hydrothermal vent fields, despite their discovery in the 1970s (Ramirez-Llodra et al, 2011). The dispersal routes are largely unknown, and species may have larger distribution ranges in deep water than in shallow water and in pelagic environments than in benthic environments (Costello and Chaudhary, 2017)
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