Recent trend in studies on ecosystem and environmental services: 2016- 2020

Abstract

The global perception of the need to integrate the concept of sustainability in the economic, social and environmental dimensions in current societies has generated an effort between countries and institutions for the conservation of biodiversity and an understanding of the benefits obtained by human beings provided by the ecosystem. The objective of this work was to evaluate the state of the art in the scope of research in ecosystem and environmental services through a bibliometric survey in the Scopus database, in order to raise trends and highlights in the period between 2016 and 2020, referring to the number of publications, journals, institutions, countries and keywords. With the data obtained, it was found that: 1) the attention paid to the topic has evolved, resulting in an increase of 59.6% in the number of publications between 2016 and 2020; 2) the multidisciplinary nature of the theme reflects the diversity of journals that publish on the theme, with a predominance of those in the area of ​​Ecology; 3) the growing interest in the social study of ES stands out; 4) there is a predominance of publication by the category of provision, services linked to the soil ecosystem and those aimed at monitoring ecosystem and environmental services ; 5) in absolute numbers, the United States is the leading country in this field of study, followed by China and European countries such as Germany and Italy; such interest is reflected in the institutions that most analyze the scope of ecosystem and environmental services ; 5) the high frequency keywords in the publications are “Ecosystem”, “Environmental” and “Management”, and indicate the element of study and the integrative character of ecosystem services.