A Review of Ecosystem Services Based on Bibliometric Analysis: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Assessing the value of ecosystem services (ESV) can promote coordinated economic and ecological development. This study aimed to systematically review ecosystem services (ES) research history and research methodology and used the CiteSpace software to analyze 4063 papers in the field of service value in the ecosystem and visually analyze the developments in ES assessment; a conceptual framework combined with landscape genetics for evaluating ES was then constructed. The results showed that, first, the number of articles in the Web of Science (WoS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases has been increasing annually. Moreover, Ecosystem Services, Sustainability, Ecological Indicators, Science of The Total Environment and Journal of Cleaner Production are the top five journals publishing the greatest number of studies. Second, ES research has seeped into life cycles and landscapes. Lastly, valuation of ES under the impacts of climate change and land use is the current research hotspot. The landscape genetics conceptual framework proposed in this study is a classification system based on the nature of ecological processes and can provide new ideas and methods for ES assessment.