Application of Remote Sensing Technology in Wildfire Research: Bibliometric Perspective

Applications of Remote Sensing (RS) has recently attracted increasing attention in wildfire research. In this study, a total of 2842 documents related to remote sensing-based wildfire research (RS-based wildfire research) have been collected from Science Citation Index Expanded database in the Web of Science Core Collection (WOS CC) for analyzing its development and currently popular concerns by using VOSviewer. Results show that the publications exhibit an exponential increase on the whole since 2000. It is identified that the most productive journal is Remote Sensing, with 235 published articles, accounting for 8.27% of the total research publications. The United States is the most prolific country with 1200 documents. NASA, USDA Forest Service and University of Maryland that affiliated to USA are the top three institutions with more than 100 publications. The co-authorship network shows that the application of remote sensing to wildfire attracts a large number of researchers’ attention. The topic analysis demonstrates that the hot topics cover the whole process of wildfire. The reference analysis and co-citation network also confirm this finding.