Abstract
Grassland remote sensing (GRS) is an important research topic that applies remote sensing technology to grassland ecosystems, reflects the number of grassland resources and grassland health promptly, and provides inversion information used in sustainable development management. A scientometrics analysis based on Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E) was performed to understand the research trends and areas of focus in GRS research studies. A total of 2692 papers related to GRS research studies and 82,208 references published from 1980 to 2020 were selected as the research objects. A comprehensive overview of the field based on the annual documents, research areas, institutions, influential journals, core authors, and temporal trends in keywords were presented in this study. The results showed that the annual number of documents increased exponentially, and more than 100 papers were published each year since 2010. Remote sensing, environmental sciences, and ecology were the most popular Web of Science research areas. The journal Remote Sensing was one of the most popular for researchers to publish documents and shows high development and publishing potential in GRS research studies. The institution with the greatest research documents and most citations was the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Guo X.L., Hill M.J., and Zhang L. were the most productive authors across the 40-year study period in terms of the number of articles published. Seven clusters of research areas were identified that generated contributions to this topic by keyword co-occurrence analysis. We also detected 17 main future directions of GRS research studies by document co-citation analysis. Emerging or underutilized methodologies and technologies, such as unmanned aerial systems (UASs), cloud computing, and deep learning, will continue to further enhance GRS research in the process of achieving sustainable development goals. These results can help related researchers better understand the past and future of GRS research studies.
Highlights
Grasslands are an integral part of the terrestrial ecosystem, and are the most widely distributed form of land cover [1], covering 33% of the world’s land surface [2]
The results show that the number of papers in one institution is significantly higher than that in other institutions, which indicates that the research documents of the five most-influential institutions are unbalanced
The results show that the number of papers in one institution is significantly higher than that in other institutions, which indicates that the ens. 2021, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW
Summary
Grasslands are an integral part of the terrestrial ecosystem, and are the most widely distributed form of land cover [1], covering 33% of the world’s land surface [2]. Bibliometrics and scientometrics are important quantitative tools for analyzing the progress of a certain research topic from a macro to a more micro perspective (the macro perspective is based on analysis of the whole research as several papers, categories, research countries, institutions, journals, authors, while micro perspective interprets the keywords, co-cited literature and highlighted literature) based on the scientific peer-reviewed literature [24,25,31] They integrate computer engineering, big data applications, and statistics, and are used in many fields. The results of these analyses (1) reveal the document pattern of GRS research at the global scale; (2) provide an accurate overview of the scientific evolutionary path for GRS research; (3) provide the current research status and popular research areas; (4) strengthen future strategies for GRS research
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