Soil macrofauna in Brazil: a bibliometric review and state of the art

Abstract

Macrofauna individuals' knowledge and their environmental functions is essential to seek more conservationist forest management practices. Understanding how the publications are being distributed in Brazil, and what knowledge need to be discussed to direct future research. The purpose of this review was to compile and analyze all publications on soil macrofauna in Brazil until 2019, conducting a bibliometric and state of the art review. 60 documents were evaluated, it was analyzing institutions and authors, citations networks and terms used, forest sciences areas that encompass the most explored biomes, crop systems or natural environmental and the most studied soil macrofauna individuals. Since 2002, every year, publications on the topic indexed in the Scopus database. The Atlantic Forest was the most studied biome and although the North region has the largest number of states that have not yet developed works on the subject, the Amazon forest is in second place in terms of publications, together with Savannah/Cerrado. The largest gap in studies and areas of natural fields is found in the Brazilian North. The macrofauna individuals studied, the highlights are from the orders Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Blattodea, Araneae and Hemiptera. Vegetation type was carried out predominantly in native forests, followed by pasture.