Application of Multi-Plant Symbiotic Systems in Phytoremediation: A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

The bibliometric analysis technique was used to retrieve 232 relevant publications from the Web of Science core database published between 2002 and 2022. The basic characteristics of the literature were analyzed, and keyword co-occurrence analysis and literature co-citation analysis were performed. The results demonstrated the following: (1) The total number of publications on phytoremediation utilizing a multi-plant symbiosis system increased year by year, indicating that multi-plant symbiosis systems have garnered significant interest in the field of phytoremediation in recent years. (2) “Short rotation coppice” (#0), “straw” (#1), “heavy metal” (#2), “soil enzymes” (#3), “glomus caledonium” (#4), and “phenanthrene” (#5) comprise the research hotspots in this field both domestically and internationally, where the #0 clusters, #2 clusters, and #5 clusters indicate that the application of multi-plant combinations has not formed a new branch in the field of phytoremediation during 2007–2017. In addition, the #1 clusters, #3 clusters, and #4 clusters indicate that the safety of agricultural land, the mechanism of action of soil enzymes, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi comprise research hotspots in recent years. (3) “Heavy metal contamination” (#0), “agro-mining” (#1), “Leguminosae” (#2), “soil enzymes” (#3), “soil microbial community” (#4), and “Salix caprea” (#5) constitute the domestic and international knowledge base of this field, with a study of soil microbial communities regarded as the cutting-edge branch of this field. (4) The specific influencing factors of multi-plant symbiotic systems include plant diversity, interspecific relationships, and the gender of plant species, and the mechanisms of action include the plant–soil feedback mechanism, enhanced plant resistance mechanism, increased detoxification pathway, and plant–plant interaction mechanism. Finally, future research on phytoremediation using multi-plant symbiotic systems should focus on the following four aspects: exploring the applicable environment of multi-plant symbiotic systems as a remediation strategy; analyzing the remediation mechanism from multiple perspectives: atmosphere–plant–soil; combining physicochemical and biological technologies to improve remediation efficiency; and establishing a dynamic model to evaluate remediation effects.