A bibliometric review of ecosystem services and coastal zones: diagnoses and trends

Abstract

Bibliometric analysis is an instrument used to quantify scientific production on a given topic. This type of analysis can be applied to show trends in an area of study. This review aims to examine how scientific production on ecosystem services, coastal zones, and ports is being carried out, identifying trends and gaps. The guiding questions of the work focused on the growth of production, the ports as focal points, the ecosystems studied, the methodologies used, and which ecosystem services were the focus of discussion. Searches on catalog platforms were made to determine how many articles would be considered for analysis, and after filtering, 91 articles were examined. The main results show that the years 2014 and 2018 were the peak of publications; the United States of America is the country that presented most publications with 19 papers; ports appear in just over 20% of the analyzed works, and beaches and marine environments, such as the continental shelf and slopes, are focus of discussion. More than 50 ecosystem services were found in the analysis, with “food” and “recreational values” being the most studied services. With the decade of the oceans, there is a tendency for the growth of scientific production, maintaining the relevance of the themes, particularly when studied together.