Grassland Ecosystem Progress: A Review and Bibliometric Analysis Based on Research Publication over the Last Three Decades

Understanding the grassland ecosystem is crucial for improving grassland ecosystem functions and services such as climate regulation, water and soil conservation, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity and gene pool maintenance. However, a systematic and comprehensive review of the relevant literature is still unclear and lacking. The VOSviewer software and cluster analysis were used to visually analyze and perform dimension reduction classification on the 27,778 studies related to grassland ecosystem research based on the Web of Science database. The number of publications targeting grassland ecosystem increased rapidly from 2006 to 2021. Ecology, agronomy, and environmental science were the most popular research categories, and the top journal sources were Remote Sensing, Journal of Ecology, and Ecology and Evolution. The leading publishing countries were the United States, China, and Germany. The top three institutions were the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Colorado State University. Cooperation between different countries and institutions had increased. Keyword co-occurrence network analysis showed that Biodiversity, Vegetation and Conservation were the most popular study areas, grassland management, climate change, land use pattern, and ecosystem impact were the hot research topics. All studies could be divided into three categories by cluster analysis: grassland ecological characteristics including basic physicochemical properties, vegetation community characteristics, aboveground and belowground biomass, and soil structural quality of grassland; driving mechanisms that demonstrated effects of human activities and climate change on grassland ecosystem function; and grassland ecosystem services that focused the influences of different grassland management strategies on ecological services, animal welfare and human well-being. The three topic categories of reviewed studies were interrelated and consistent with each other, and the performances were progressive. This paper reviewed the trend evolution through keyword hotspots and analyzed the future research directions to provide an important reference for scientists to better respond to the balance of herbage and sustainable utilization of grassland and maintenance of ecological security.

Automated summary

Understanding the grassland ecosystem is crucial for improving functions and services such as climate regulation, water and soil conservation, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity maintenance. However, a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature is lacking. This study visually analyzed 27,778 studies on grassland ecosystem research and found an increasing number of publications targeting grassland ecosystem. The top research categories were ecology, agronomy, and environmental science, and the leading countries and institutions were the United States, China, Germany, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Colorado State University. The study areas and research topics focused on biodiversity, vegetation, conservation, grassland management, climate change, land use patterns, and ecosystem impact.