Scientometric Analysis and Scientific Trends on Land Trust

Modern land protection and biodiversity conservation depend greatly on the application of land trust. With the accelerated development of land trust organizations, the land trust has become the most effective land conservation method. To draw and analyze the current status of the research on the field of the land trust, we conduct the cluster analysis of co-citation and keywords co-occupation, and comb the evolution of international land trust research from 1990 to 2019. This article collected 1341 related documents included in the “Web of Science” database as the basic data for analysis, combined with bibliometrics method and visualization software to find out the landmark literature with high burst value, and study literature co-citation clusters in the network map. The results show that the main subject of collected literatures is related to ecology and environment. The hotspots of international land trust mainly cover four aspects: conserving private land by conservation easements, impact and response to climate change, collaborative governance, and community land trust (CLT). It is found that the land trust research has formed a clear co-citation cluster differentiation. By analyzing and sorting out the landmark literatures and hotspots in the field of the land trust, the purpose of this study is to provide researchers with more reference for research implementation.