Past and Present Research and Engineering Practice of Ecological Restoration: New Opportunities to Match New Changes

摘要

Ecological restoration has grown astoundingly in the past three decades. Our aims are to detect the evolution of research and engineering practice of ecological restoration, to find the focus changes in this field over time, to identify the relationships between the topics discussed in the field, and to sense the opportunities to match new changes. We conducted a statistical and bibliometrical analysis on pubjished articles in ISI Web of Science database by using EndNoteX, SPSS, and RefViz Materials published (n=4,862) between Jan., 1981 and Jun., 2009 were used in the analysis. Our results show that (1)Three distinct stages (1981-1996, 1997-2002, 20032009) were identified in temporal evolution of ecological restoration with total article numbers 59, 1403, and 3400, respectively. (2)The distributions of articles in three stages show that research topics extensively expanded in the second stage and research contents diversified in the third stage. (3) After analyzing associations, we established a framework that show ecological restoration research and practice has mainly focused on terrestrial ecosystem (main element is soil) and aquatic ecosystem (main element is water). Our opinion is that the trend of ecological restoration went from practices to science which covers a spectrum of quite different fields, including managemental political, and technical aspects. Publication of diverse ecological restoration studies should be encouraged to speed up the transformation of this discipline.