AccScience Publishing / AJWEP / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/AJWEP026190132
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Research progress of China’s grassland ecosystems in the 21st century based on bibliometric analysis

Jirimutu Jirimutu1 ,  Xiaomin Li1* ,  Siqi Zhang2
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1 Department of Art and Technology, School of Design, Inner Mongolia Normal University, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China
2 Graduate School of Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chiba University, Chiba, Chiba, Japan
AJWEP, 026190132 https://doi.org/10.36922/AJWEP026190132
Received: 6 May 2026 | Revised: 18 June 2026 | Accepted: 22 June 2026 | Published online: 2 July 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

Grasslands are critical ecological barriers and carbon sinks, and research on China’s grassland ecosystems has expanded in response to climate change, ecological restoration, and carbon-neutrality goals. This study conducted a systematic bibliometric analysis of the research progress of China’s grassland ecosystems from 2000 to 2025. The results show that publication output increased slowly before 2020 and then rose exponentially thereafter. A total of 18 countries and regions participated in this field, with China ranking first, followed by the United States. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identified five thematic clusters, from which three major evolutionary research trajectories were further distilled: (i) driver attribution and remote-sensing diagnosis; (ii) carbon cycling and the re-evaluation of “vegetation– soil–microbe” mechanisms; and (iii) ecosystem services and spatial governance. The study further identifies that the field continues to face several challenges, including weak integration of cross-scale and multi-process analyses, insufficient mechanistic interpretation, limited quantification of uncertainty, and obstacles in translating research outcomes into policy. Overall, the findings indicate that, supported by multi-source data fusion, research on China’s grassland ecosystems is shifting from change monitoring and attribution toward mechanistic explanations of stability and responses to extreme events. In addition, workflows such as Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) and Patch-generating Land Use Simulation (PLUS) show considerable potential for incorporating carbon sequestration and ecosystem service assessments into verifiable scenario comparisons and spatial governance decision-making.

Keywords
China’s grassland ecosystem
Bibliometric analysis
Data-driven analysis
Knowledge visualization
Research evolution
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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Asian Journal of Water, Environment and Pollution, Electronic ISSN: 1875-8568 Print ISSN: 0972-9860, Published by AccScience Publishing
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