Wheat is an important staple crop in the global food chain. The production of wheat in many regions is constrained by the lack of use of advanced technologies for wheat monitoring. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is an important platform in remote sensing for providing near real-time farm-scale information. This information aids in making recommendations for monitoring and improving crop management to ensure food security. This study appraised global scientific research trends on wheat and UAV studies between 2005 and 2021, using a bibliometric method. The 398 published documents were mined from Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions. Results showed that an annual growth rate of 23.94% indicates an increase of global research based on wheat and UAVs for the surveyed period. The results revealed that China and USA were ranked as the top most productive countries, and thus their dominance in UAVs extensive usage and research developments for wheat monitoring during the study period. Additionally, results showed a low countries research collaboration prevalent trend, with only China and Australia managing multiple country publications. Thus, most of the wheat- and UAV-related studies were based on intra-country publications. Moreover, the results showed top publishing journals, top cited documents, Zipf’s law authors keywords co-occurrence network, thematic evolution, and spatial distribution map with the lack of research outputs from Southern Hemisphere. The findings of also show that “UAV” is fundamental in all keywords with the largest significant appearance in the field. This connotes that UAV efficiency was important for most studies that were monitoring wheat and provided vital information on spatiotemporal changes and variability for crop management. Findings from this study may be useful in policy-making decisions related to the adoption and subsidizing of UAV operations for different crop management strategies designed to enhance crop yield and the direction of future studies.
An Earth observation system (EOS) is essential in monitoring and improving our understanding of how natural and managed agricultural landscapes change over time or respond to climate change and overgrazing. Such changes can be quantified using a pasture model (PM), a critical tool for monitoring changes in pastures driven by the growing population demands and climate change-related challenges and thus ensuring a sustainable food production system. This study used the bibliometric method to assess global scientific research trends in EOS and PM studies from 1979 to 2019. This study analyzed 399 published articles from the Scopus indexed database with the search term “Earth observation systems OR pasture model”. The annual growth rate of 19.76% suggests that the global research on EOS and PM has increased over time during the survey period. The average growth per article is n = 74, average total citations (ATC) = 2949 in the USA, is n = 37, ATC = 488, in China and is n = 22, ATC = 544 in Italy). These results show that the field of the study was inconsistent in terms of ATC per article during the study period. Furthermore, these results show three countries (USA, China, and Italy) ranked as the most productive countries by article publications and the Netherlands had the highest average total citations. This may suggest that these countries have strengthened research development on EOS and PM studies. However, developing counties such as Mexico, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other African countries had a lower number of publications during the study period. Moreover, the results showed that Earth observation is fundamental in understanding PM dynamics to design targeted interventions and ensure food security. In general, the paper highlights various advances in EOS and PM studies and suggests the direction of future studies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.