Bibliometric Analysis on Wildfires and Protected Areas

Abstract

Wildfire are increasingly frequent events on a planet undergoing climate change. With more favourable climate conditions for their occurrence, like prolonged periods of drought, the frequency and intensity of these catastrophes continue to increase. Protected areas are important territories for conserving ecosystems and biodiversity around the world and serve as a key management tool in national environmental policies. Many studies have been developed around the world to assess the conditions, frequency, and intensity of fires, and, on the other hand, protected areas are intensively studied to understand whether conservation actions are effective in keeping the ecosystem balanced. However, there are few studies that contemplate these two themes together. Consequently, this study offers a bibliometric analysis of the wildfires and its occurrence in protected areas, aiming to understand the spatial and temporal relation between them, characteristics of the research studies, and trending issues to be worked on. We used the Bibliometrix package in R language, which provides the option of different methods for analysing bibliometric data to understand the temporal evolution of the published documents about wildfires and protected areas. In total, 1116 publications were analysed, ranging from 1970 to 2022. The findings show that the terms “fires” (185 occurrences), “fire” (117), “wildfire” (101), and “forest fire” (92) are more frequently used and associated with studies on topics including biodiversity (304), conservation (221), environmental protection (188), deforestation (148), ecosystems (138), forestry (133), and climate change (126) as well as protected areas (399). The highest growth of research has been registered since 2002. The majority of the publications were published by authors from universities in the USA (77), South Africa (72), the United Kingdom (22), and Brazil (19). The USA leads all other countries with 7 of the top 10 international collaborations, followed by Brazil, Australia, and South Africa. However, only the United Kingdom continues to maintain an increased number of external (inter-country) collaborations, whereas the other nine continue to maintain an increased number of internal (intra-country). Considering the top 10 authors in terms of production, only 1 was active from 1999 to 2019, and the other 9 only have been active since 2009. The topics that stand out were subjected to a coupling analysis, which revealed that environmental protection is a motor theme, endangered species, Australia, and savannah are niche themes, and protected area, biodiversity, and fire management are basic themes.

Bibliometric Analysis of Trends and Future Directions of Research and Development of Seed Orchards

“…Bibliometric analysis helps to better visualize the organization and dynamics of scientific domains, to better understand a particular scientific field, and to provide predictions regarding future trends [29]. Several parameters, such as leading countries, organizations, and journals, and the contributions of various authors, citations, and keywords, have been analyzed with the help of bibliometric mapping [7][8][9]12,30,31]. Bibliometric analysis has been used for different purposes in various scientific fields (i.e., [3,11,12,20,21,32,33]).…”

“…In this study, published studies on seed orchards were examined in detail and visualized according to the following aspects using bibliometric analysis and descriptive statistics: (1) the growth trends of publications on seed orchards over time and the main characteristics of these trends; (2) countries/regions and researchers; and (3) current research topics and analysis of keywords and co-citation documents on these topics, as other studies carried out bibliometric analysis for different purposes in large fields of science (i.e., [8,9,11,12,16,17]). Descriptive statistics were calculated and obtained using an Excel worksheet.…”

“…It is also a research method for assessing the productivity of authors, countries, and institutions by revealing their global distribution, collaboration, knowledge structures development trends [3,4], depth topics, citations, citation times, and keyword co-occurrence based on Web of Science (WoS) database. While many bibliometric studies have been carried out in different scientific fields such as medicine, computing, geography, environmental science, social science, water management, and animal sciences for different purposes (e.g., [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]), limited studies have been carried out in forestry (e.g., [11,12]). In addition, published papers related to seed orchards have not yet been subjected to bibliometric analysis.…”

The Use of UAVs for Morphological Coastal Change Monitoring—A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The analysis comprises five steps: study design, data collection and selection, data analysis, data visualisation, and interpretation [28][29][30][31].…”

How post-fire succession shapes psammophilous ground-dwelling assemblages: effect of wildfire and alteration in food composition.

“…Despite its importance, re management has been sporadically used in commercial or protected areas to maintain and restore biodiversity across various habitat types, such as steppes and heaths (Marková et al 2011;Miklín and Čížek 2014;Reed-Dustin et al 2016;Folharini et al 2023). Currently, psammophilous assemblages are indirectly preserved through human activities without an explicit goal of biodiversity conservation, such as railway corridors or military training areas (Culek et al 2013;Hustáková 2015).…”