Abstract
The total area of plastic-covered crops of 3019 million hectares has been increasing steadily around the world, particularly in the form of crops maintained under plastic-covered greenhouses to control their environmental conditions and their growth, thereby increasing production. This work analyzes the worldwide research dynamics on remote sensing-based mapping of agricultural greenhouses and plastic-mulched crops throughout the 21st century. In this way, a bibliometric analysis was carried out on a total of 107 publications based on the Scopus database. Different aspects of these publications were studied, such as type of publication, characteristics, categories and journal/conference name, countries, authors, and keywords. The results showed that “articles” were the type of document mostly found, while the number of published documents has exponentially increased over the last four years, growing from only one document published in 2001 to 22 in 2019. The main Scopus categories relating to the topic analyzed were Earth and Planetary Sciences (53%), Computer Science (30%), and Agricultural and Biological Sciences (28%). The most productive journal in this field was “Remote Sensing”, with 22 documents published, while China, Italy, Spain, USA, and Turkey were the five countries with the most publications. Among the main research institutions belonging to these five most productive countries, there were eight institutions from China, four from Italy, one from Spain, two from Turkey, and one from the USA. In conclusion, the evolution of the number of publications on Remote Sensing of Agricultural Greenhouses and Plastic-Mulched Farmland found throughout the period 2000–2019 allows us to classify the subject studied as an emerging research topic that is attracting an increasing level of interest worldwide, although its relative significance is still very limited within the remote sensing discipline. However, the growing demand for information on the arrangement and spatio-temporal dynamics of this increasingly important model of intensive agriculture is likely to drive this line of research in the coming years.
Highlights
The total area of agriculture plastic film, including plastic covered greenhouses (PCG), walk-in tunnels, low tunnels (LT), and plastic-mulched farmland (PMF), has been steadily increasing throughout the world at a rate close to 20% per year [1], especially in China
The bibliometric analysis has been focused on the number of indexed articles and conference papers related to remote sensing-based mapping of agricultural greenhouses and plastic-mulched farmland, as well as the authors, journals, institutions, and countries involved in these documents
Most documents (55.2%) were published in the last four years (2016–2019), while the greatest number of documents were published in 2019 (20.6%). This proves that RSAGPM is an emerging topic in continuous progress that will probably increase its number of publications in the few years
Summary
The total area of agriculture plastic film, including plastic covered greenhouses (PCG), walk-in tunnels (high tunnels; HT), low tunnels (LT), and plastic-mulched farmland (PMF), has been steadily increasing throughout the world at a rate close to 20% per year [1], especially in China. This technology has been introduced and developed during the last 70 years as a tool to move up the first harvest and increase crops’ yield, being considered a step forward in the evolution from extensive to intensive farming [2]. It is common to grow a very varied set of aromatic plants for culinary use and even crops such as cotton, rice, and wheat
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