Evaluating the research status quo around remote sensing-mediated monitoring of grassland biomass based on bibliometrology

Grassland biomass is an important indicator of the productivity of grassland ecosystems and an important factor in evaluating the material cycle of grassland ecosystems. This study was designed to systematically evaluate the research progress of using remote sensing to monitor grassland biomass. To this end, we collected 557 documents related to the remote sensing-based evaluation of grassland biomass from the Web of Science produced between 1995 and 2020. This dataset was then evaluated using CiteSpace, which allowed for information visualization and analysis from the perspective of country/institution/discipline distribution, keyword co-occurrence, document co-citation and journal co-citation. The results show that the number of papers produced using remote sensing technologies has largely increased over the last few decades. The top three countries producing this type of research are the United States, China and Germany. The number of documents issued by the Chinese Academy of Sciences far exceeds that of any of the other institutions, and ecology, environmental science, and remote sensing are the primary disciplines described in these papers. “Ecology” is the most cited journal and has the greatest influence in this field. The keyword co-occurrence map shows that vegetation, grassland, climate change, ecology, and above-ground biomass are all important node keywords. Additional analysis of the hot keywords and the results of cited literature clustering show that new remote sensing data sources and model construction methods should bring new opportunities for the development of novel applications for remote sensing-based monitoring of grassland biomass.