Abstract:
Soil quality monitoring and evaluation are critical for promoting long-term agricultural success. A bibliometric approach was utilized to study the current status and hot areas of research in this subject over the last 20 years in order to understand the current frontier and advancement of remote sensing research on soil quality. The CiteSpace bibliometric software was used to analyze 1240 valid papers in the field of remote sensing of soil quality from 2002 to 2021 in the Web of Science core collection database, using the theme words “soil quality, remote sensing, RS” as well as visualize and analyze them from the perspectives of publication volume time, publication country, publication institution, keyword emergence, keyword clustering analysis, and co-citation clustering. The results indicated that between 2017 and 2021, the number of articles published on soil quality remote sensing research literature is rapidly increasing. The countries with the most articles are the United States, China, Germany, the Netherlands, and India. The main research directions are ecological and environmental disciplines, remote sensing, geology, imaging, and photographic techniques, agriculture, and water resources. By analyzing the keyword (co-occurrence density, outburst,co-citation) mapping, it could be inferred that the future hot spots of remote sensing research on soil quality including the global soil moisture dataset will become an important data source for monitoring soil quality. Researches on soil erosion, salinization, organic carbon, etc. will monitor the degree of soil degradation with cross-fertilization of remote sensing, sensing technology and GIS. Future soil quality remote sensing research will place a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and will grow to a global scale with high accuracy.