Speaker
Description
Food security has become a focal point for global efforts in the era of climate change. As crop’s droughts exposure intensifies through climate change, scientists have focused on developing both predictive models and plant genetic solutions to address this threat on food security.
Our investigation, based on over 130,000 scientific abstracts from Elsevier's Scopus database, highlights the extensive and diverse research efforts in this field. We map the research landscape on drought into fine, medium, and coarse thematic areas using an unsupervised machine learning method. Since the 1980s, the number of drought research studies has increased exponentially. Research topics "plant genetics" and "drought forecasting" are particularly dominating in recent years and decades. Both showing a still positive upward trend which indicates where researchers and funding agencies allocate their interest, output and funding in the context of drought.
The genetic approach in drought research focuses on developing crops that are resistant to drought stress. Recent advances in plant genetics, plant breeding" and plant stress response, can be highlighted as gene expression analysis as active response to drought stress, stress tolerance, and anti-oxidative mechanisms in plants.
Parallel to this, predictive research has experienced significant growth. Here, the areas of remote sensing, drought indices and modelling are major avenues for enabling predictions, quantify drought impacts and identify appropriate counter-measures.
It is also notable that despite a decline in the relative proportion of research on topics such as ecology and water use efficiency, the absolute number of research papers in these areas continues to increase. This illustrates the breadth and depth of research efforts in the field of drought research.
In conclusion, we emphasize the relevance of the findings for identifying research trends, promoting interdisciplinary collaborations, quantifying the significance of various research areas for policy and strategic decisions in the context of drought issues, and serving as a foundation and inspiration for the development of new research projects by providing a data-driven and comprehensive picture of drought research.
| Keywords | review, drought research, forecasting, plant physiology, plant genetics, |
|---|
