Climate Change and Citriculture: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Citrus are the most produced fruits worldwide. It is expected that these crops will be severely affected by climate change. However, the literature lacks works that attempt to understand the influence of climate change on citrus. For this reason, a bibliometric analysis was conducted on climate change and citrus to investigate its development and current trends in this research domain. The main trends, keywords, and their relations were identified. The period from 1992 to 2022 was analyzed, resulting in 178 documents in the Scopus database. The most significant publishers’ countries were also the largest citrus producers in the world besides being G7 members. Three main research areas were identified: modeling, socio-political issues, and plant physiology. A tendency to change interest from modeling and risk analysis to physiology and stress studies was observed. Additionally, some of the most cited papers observed the positive impacts of climate change on certain citrus crops. Despite the multidisciplinary publications, two main gaps were identified: (i) the lack of investigations with combined stresses (abiotic and biotic) instead of isolated studies, and (ii) the lack of studies of predictive models for citrus production in different conditions and climate change scenarios. Finally, there was a tendency toward studying water use and irrigation alternatives due to water scarcity and management solutions to improve the production system’s resilience, considering the potential impacts of climate change.