Research trends in the environmental assessment of poplar plantations in Hungary: A bibliometric analysis

Climate change mitigation and adaptation are essential issues at many summit meetings. Environmental assessment is a possible tool to describe the potential sequestration of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. The forest carbon stock and life cycle assessment approach was used here to analyze poplar plantations in Hungary. This study aims to describe the research trends of environmental assessment of poplar plantations in Hungary using VOSviewer software. A total of 1,528 documents from the Scopus database were used in this research. VOSviewer analysis was conducted to detail the bibliometric maps from generic (“forest” OR “forestry” AND “Hungary”), medium (“poplar” AND “Hungary”), and specific (“poplar” AND “carbon” AND “Hungary” / (“poplar” AND “life cycle assessment”) OR (“LCA” AND “Hungary”). The findings show that the number of documents on forest research in Hungary has increased significantly since the 2000s. However, items on environmental assessment, either forest carbon or life cycle assessment, produced only a tiny number with weak links. In conclusion, i). the large number of collected documents produced more clusters; ii). The item of Hungary is the most frequently used keyword in the research article; and iii). The research theme of environmental assessment (carbon sequestration and life cycle assessment) of poplar plantations in Hungary is the continuing lack of knowledge. Furthermore, the research on biodiversity and climate change mitigation (carbon stock and sequestration) were prominent topics that many researchers do. In the future, research on climate change mitigation through the life cycle assessment to analyze global warming potential (GWP) from forestry activities is a prospective research topic to enrich the study on poplar bioenergy plantations.