Exploring Forest Sector Research Subjects and Trends from 2000 to 2019 Using Topic Modeling

Abstract

Purpose of Review This review aims to discover the most common topics and trends in international scientific forest sector research between January 2000 and December 2019 and to test the suitability of a quantitative topic-modeling method to extract topics from the data. The results will be helpful for both researchers and policy decision-makers in identifying emerging research topics and possible research gaps. The analysis framework covers the complete forest wood chain (FWC) with PESTE factors. PESTE is applied to analyze political, economic, social, technological, and ecological/environmental factors affecting the FWC. Recent findings In the last two decades, forests and the forest sector have been impacted by several global changes, policies, and megatrends. Previous systematic syntheses of forest sector research reveal that economic, policy, and social research have remained underrepresented in the forest sector literature. Research areas related to forest ecology and climate change have been increasing. More recently, growth has also been detected in social aspects especially related to the increasing literature on forest ecosystem services. Results A total of 160 topics were extracted from 14,470 abstracts of 15 leading international peer-reviewed forest science journals. The ecological topics of forest resources and technological topics of industry and products were by far the two largest subject areas. Ecological topics increased, while technological topics slightly decreased, during the period between 2000 and 2019. A clear decline in the share of topics concerning end-product markets was detected. Indeed, changes in end markets drive changes in the entire forest wood chain. To support the goal of a transition from a fossil-based economy to a bioeconomy, it will be important to increase academic research on policy impacts, as well as social and ecological sustainability issues to cover all the stages of the FWC more evenly. The topic-modeling method was a useful tool in data mining, but human intelligence is needed to interpret and classify the topics extracted by this approach.

Civil society’s perception of forest ecosystem services. A case study in the Western Alps

“…Several authors highlighted the importance of the role attributed to FES for the environment, society, and economy (Acharya et al, 2019;Bussola et al, 2021;Kramer et al, 2022). In a review conducted by Nummelin et al (2021) on the topics and trends of international forestry scientific research in the period 2000-2019, an increasing interest in such services emerged. The recognition of FES by civil society led, on the one hand, for forest owners and managers to deal with an increase in their demand, as reported by Müller et al (2020); on the other hand, as highlighted by Bonsu et al (2017) in the creation of bottomup initiatives that gave space for the population to participate in decision-making processes of forest planning and management.…”

Research Progress on Forest Eco-Product Value Realization and Eco-Industry: The Inspiration for Planted Forests in Karst Desertification Control

“…There is an urgent need to realize forest EP values for conservation and development in ecologically fragile areas, but the economic, policy and social research corresponding to EPs is still lacking [98]. The forest ecological product supply capacity in karst regions is prone to decline, due to deforestation and degradation.…”

“…To fully realize the ecological value of these planted forests in KDC regions, a strategy for value realization should be developed, based on regional characteristics and the distinct ecological products themselves. For instance, the southern karst region could focus on initiatives like the national KD restoration There is an urgent need to realize forest EP values for conservation and development in ecologically fragile areas, but the economic, policy and social research corresponding to EPs is still lacking [98]. The forest ecological product supply capacity in karst regions is prone to decline, due to deforestation and degradation.…”

Tailoring forest management to local socio-ecological contexts : Addressing climate change and local stakeholders’ expectations of forests

“…Topics represent the main themes in large collections of texts, and topic modelling was developed to organise and analyse such text-based datasets (Blei 2012). In the contexts of forest research, topic modelling has been used to analyse forest policies (Firebanks-Quevedo et al 2022) and to review scientific literature (Clare & Hickey 2019;Nummelin et al 2021), while this study is the first to apply it to media analysis. One of the most common topic models is LDA, which was developed in 2003 (Blei et al 2003).…”