Mapping Three Decades of Ecosystem Services Research: Who Publishes, Who Collaborates, Who Gets Left Behind

Few ideas have reshaped modern environmental science as quietly and as thoroughly as the concept of ecosystem services. The term describes the direct and indirect benefits that ecosystems deliver to human well-being, from timber and clean water to flood regulation, pollination, carbon sequestration, and the less tangible cultural value of a wild coastline or an old-growth forest. Over roughly three decades, what began as a framing device for conservation economics has grown into one of the busiest crossroads in environmental research, pulling in ecologists, economists, geographers, modelers, and policy analysts. A new bibliometric analysis published in Discover Sustainability by Heloiza Santos Borges, Lucas Mateus Coelho Nunes, and Manoel Tavares de Paula of the State University of Pará in Brazil now offers the most comprehensive map yet of how this field has expanded, who drives it, and where its blind spots lie.

The scale of the study is itself a measure of the field’s growth. Working from the Scopus database, the researchers searched for the phrase ecosystem services in article titles, abstracts, and keywords, covering the period from 1994 to 2025. The search returned 68,149 publications, a corpus produced by 74,726 organizations and 91,128 author labels spanning a large number of countries and territories. To make sense of that volume, the team turned to VOSviewer, a widely used bibliometric software package that constructs and visualizes networks of co-authorship, citation, and keyword co-occurrence. Rather than reading thousands of papers individually, the method treats the literature itself as a dataset, letting the structure of collaborations and the frequency of terms reveal the field’s anatomy.

The temporal signal in the data is unambiguous. Scientific output on ecosystem services remained modest through the 1990s and 2000s, then rose sharply after 2010, a marked increase that the authors identify as the defining feature of the field’s evolution. That inflection point corresponds with several converging developments: the mainstreaming of the ecosystem services framework in international assessments, the expansion of open-access publishing, the growth of computational tools for mapping and valuing natural capital, and the steady integration of environmental concerns into national research agendas. Whatever the precise mix of causes, the post-2010 surge means that the overwhelming majority of everything science now knows under this banner has been produced within roughly the last fifteen years.

Geographically, the picture is dominated by a small cluster of research powers. The United States, China, the United Kingdom, and Germany stand out on every metric the study examined: publication volume, citation impact, and centrality within international collaboration networks. Network centrality matters because it reflects not just how much a country publishes but how deeply it is woven into the global web of co-authorship. A central node in a collaboration network acts as a bridge, channeling ideas, methods, datasets, and early-career researchers between otherwise disconnected clusters. The dominance of these four nations suggests that the conceptual agenda of ecosystem services research, including which questions get asked and which ecosystems get studied, is shaped disproportionately by institutions in North America, Europe, and East Asia.

Latin America’s presence in the analysis is led by Brazil, which the authors describe as showing relevant participation, particularly in international collaboration networks. That finding carries weight beyond bibliometrics. Brazil hosts some of the planet’s most consequential ecosystems, including the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest and a keystone of regional and global climate regulation. Research capacity in countries that steward such ecosystems is not merely an academic statistic; it shapes whether local knowledge, local priorities, and local policy needs are represented in the global literature. The Brazilian case, anchored here by a research group based in Belém at the mouth of the Amazon, illustrates how national investment in science, supported in this instance by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, CNPq, can translate biodiversity-rich geography into genuine scientific influence.

Keyword analysis adds a thematic layer to the map. The most prominent recurring terms cluster around biodiversity, climate change, and sustainability, confirming that ecosystem services research has become a hub concept connecting these previously separate strands of environmental science. The authors also note the visibility of certain countries as geographic research contexts, meaning that place names themselves function as keywords in the literature. This is a subtle but telling pattern: it indicates that much of the field’s empirical work is organized around case studies in specific landscapes and nations, and that the identity of those study sites reflects, once again, where research funding and international partnerships are concentrated.

The study’s most sobering finding concerns the asymmetries. The geographic distribution of scientific production is markedly uneven, with lower representation of countries and regions that show limited connectivity in international collaboration networks. The authors single out parts of Africa, small island states, and other countries with low participation in Scopus-indexed literature. The pattern is self-reinforcing. Researchers who are poorly connected publish less, are cited less, and attract fewer collaborators, which in turn weakens the institutional case for funding their work. Meanwhile, the ecosystems those regions contain, including coral reefs, drylands, mangroves, and tropical islands, are among those most vulnerable to environmental change and most dependent on the kind of applied ecosystem services knowledge that the global literature is best positioned to supply.

There is also a measurement caveat embedded in these asymmetries. Because the analysis relies on Scopus, it captures only what that index records. Scholarship published in national journals, in languages other than English, or in gray literature produced for governments and communities simply does not appear in the count. The authors are careful to frame the underrepresentation of certain regions as low participation in Scopus-indexed literature rather than an absence of knowledge production. Even so, the visibility gap has real consequences: meta-analyses, global assessments, and machine-learning models trained on indexed publications will systematically inherit the geographic biases of the database, and policy frameworks built on those syntheses may underweight regions that are data-poor on paper but rich in both ecosystems and expertise.

Methodologically, the study exemplifies the growing use of bibliometric approaches to audit the development of scientific fields. VOSviewer-based mapping cannot judge the quality or accuracy of individual studies, and the authors do not claim it can. What it does provide is a structural diagnosis: which institutions form the field’s backbone, which themes dominate its vocabulary, and which parts of the world are effectively missing from the conversation. In a field like ecosystem services, whose explicit purpose is to inform decisions about how societies manage and protect the natural systems they depend on, that structural diagnosis doubles as a statement about whose values and priorities are embedded in the science that policymakers ultimately read.

The authors position their work as an updated overview of global publication patterns and a contribution to ongoing discussions on scientific collaboration, knowledge production, and the international distribution of research capacity. The implications reach well beyond bibliometrics. If the next decade of ecosystem services research is to deliver on its promise of guiding sustainable management of the planet’s living systems, closing the connectivity gaps identified in this analysis, particularly for African nations and small island states, will be as important as any single scientific breakthrough. The map drawn by Borges, Nunes, and de Paula shows a field that has grown explosively and productively since 2010, but also one whose benefits, like the ecosystems it studies, are unevenly distributed. Making the science of nature’s contributions to people as global as nature itself may be the field’s defining task for the years ahead.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric analysis of global ecosystem services research trends, collaboration networks, and geographic asymmetries from 1994 to 2025

Article Title: Global trends in ecosystem services research

Article References: Borges, H. S., Nunes, L. M. C., & de Paula, M. T. (2026). Global trends in ecosystem services research. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04674-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04674-9

Keywords: ecosystem services, bibliometrics, VOSviewer, scientific collaboration, biodiversity, climate change, sustainability, Scopus, research asymmetries, Brazil, global research capacity, Discover Sustainability