Forest Landscape Restoration and Local Stakeholders: A Global Bibliometric Mapping Analysis

Forest landscape restoration (FLR) has a central place in current global debates about the sustainability of natural resources, climate change mitigation and adaptation, livelihoods and biodiversity conservation. FLR approaches support the involvement of different social actors in participatory decision-making processes. We conducted a bibliometric analysis research to provide an overview of scientific publications in forest restoration, FLR and local stakeholders (LS) studies, and, specifically, examine if the studies (1) recognised the relevance of the local level actors and (2) collected primary and/or secondary data on LS using different methods from related publications since 2000. We used the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus as bibliographic sources. We analysed five main research aspects: (1) publication year, (2) most productive countries according to the total number of publications, (3) most influential journals and cited papers, (4) most influential authors ranked by number of publications, their respective organisations and country collaborations, and (5) a co-occurrence analysis of countries’ collaborations and keywords. We found that forest restoration, FLR and LS studies have been growing over the years, especially in the last decade. However, only 50% (99 records) of the studies recognised the relevance of the local level actors and also collected primary and/or secondary data through different methods. Authors from organisations in North and South America, and Oceania were the ones with the most publications, with only 20% (4 authors) of the top 20 authors having degrees in social sciences. Studies about “ecosystem services”, “ecological restoration”, “natural regeneration”, “livelihoods”, “Bonn challenge” and “governance” have become the main subject of research along the years within the scope of FLR at the local level. Finally, the results showed the gaps that should be considered in future research to improve the involvement and more direct participation of LS, as well as the participation of interdisciplinary and social science researchers in FLR research teams.