Four Decades in Fires Research - a Bibliometric Analysis About the Impact on Mineralogy and Nutrients

Abstract

As wildfires have increased in extension and frequency over the past several years, research is focused on how wildfires influence ecosystem resilience, which has serious implications for the recovery and protection of native forests and plantations. Fires can drastically impact most physicochemical and biological soil properties, including soil surface mineralogical composition. However, from a bibliometric point of view, no attempt has been made to provide a comprehensive picture of the research status on fire effects in mineralogy and nutrient stocks. This work aims to evaluate fire effects on mineralogy and nutrients (FMN), the thematic evolution and determine the most relevant trends according to the intellectual structure of the knowledge built up in this research field through bibliometric analysis, using the VOSviewer software. The methodology comprises two phases: (i) Data Collection, and (ii) Bibliometric Analysis and Data Mining (Performance Analysis and Science Mapping). A detailed bibliometric analysis was performed, including 530 articles based on publications in the Web of Science (WOS) in the period 1984–2020. In general, the results demonstrate that Forest Ecology and Management is the leading journal in the field. The USA, Spain, and France are the top three countries hosting core research centers for this topic. Certini G. was the author with more citations (1395) in one paper and Johnson, D. had the more published papers (19) that received 549 citations in total. Currently, the hotspots fire issues mainly include soil nutrients (e.g. nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, and calcium); in addition to the selected keywords, wildfires co-occurs more frequently with disturbances and terms such as soils, water quality, boreal forests, and stream. In conclusion, the growing interest in the field is evident considering 530 articles written by 1822 authors and their research exhibited in 211 journals, from universities and research centers in 60 countries.

Keywords: nutrients, Mineralogy, Wildfires, Soil organic carbon, Biogeochemical cycles, ash