Ecological restoration research progress and prospects: A bibliometric analysis

Ecological restoration has attracted global research attention due to its importance in solving increasingly severe ecological and environmental problems. However, systematic and comprehensive reviews of this topic from a bibliometric perspective are scarce. Here, 6908 articles were retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database from 1991 to 2021. The research progress, hotspots and prospects in ecological restoration were explored using the bibliometric analysis software CiteSpace. The results revealed that the number of publications on ecological restoration has increased rapidly over the past 30 years and particularly in the last three years. The outstanding scholars in the field include Bojie Fu, Kelin Wang, Pedro H. S. Brancalion, Peter Z. Fulé and James Aronson. The United States contributed the most publications and was the core country in the international cooperation network. The Chinese Academy of Science was the most productive institution with 979 articles and 26,972 total citations. Keyword co-occurrence and frequency analysis showed that ‘ecological restoration of different ecosystems’, ‘biodiversity conservation and restoration’ and ‘environmental factors and human disturbances affecting ecological restoration’ were current hotspots in this research field. Notably, researchers have switched focus from local and single ecosystems to social-economic-natural coupled ecosystem ecological restoration. Additionally, implementing ecological restoration using multidisciplinary knowledge, utilising microbial communities to promote restoration and establishing rational and effective evaluation systems are future development trends in ecological restoration research. The findings of this review provide a systematic overview of the development of ecological restoration research and provide a valuable reference for future research.