Trends of Peatland Research Based on Topic Modeling: Toward Sustainable Management under Climate Change

Abstract

Peatlands are wetlands with an accumulation of peats, partially decomposed organisms, under waterlogged and anoxic conditions. Despite peatlands being extensively studied due to their wide distribution and various functions, the trends in peatland research have hardly been analyzed. We performed dynamic topic modeling (DTM) and network analysis to investigate the changes in the global trends in peatland research. Among the searched studies using the keyword ‘peatland’ from ScienceDirect, titles and abstracts from 9541 studies (1995–2022) were used for the analysis. They were classified into 16 topics via DTM (geomorphology, land use and land cover, production, greenhouse gas, habitat, permafrost, management, deposit, fire, soil organic matter, peatland formation, forest, past environmental change, microbe, metal, and hydrology). Among these, the proportion of ‘management’ was the largest and increased the fastest, showing the transition of research trends toward the sustainable management of peatlands under climate change. The keywords used within topics tended to change dynamically when related to a large number of studies and increasing trends. Network analysis among topics suggested that studying peatlands as a response measure to climate change will promote overall peatland research because the greenhouse gases topic had the greatest impact on other topics. Despite increasing research on peatland management under climate change, a gap between academia and policies was found in the field of using peatlands as a response measure to climate change, indicating the necessity for effective policies, research, and technology. This study demonstrates that DTM and network analysis are useful tools for understanding the temporal shift of views on peatlands and finding a gap we need to focus on in the near future.