The use of nucleation techniques to restore the environment : a bibliometric analysis.

Abstract

The population awareness about environmental conservation is raising and this broughtabout an increase in the number of environmental restoration studies. Nucleation is a tech-nique used for environmental restoration, where small nuclei of vegetation are establishedwithin degraded land. The aim of this paper was to evaluate, by doing a bibliometric analy-sis, the tendencies and gaps in the study of environmental restoration using the nucleationtechnique. Data were collected using The Web of Science©and Google Scholar©databases,from 1996 to 2012. Keywords used in the search of papers were nucleation, soil recovery,transposition of soil, bird perches, ecological succession, seed rain, restoration ecology, for-est regeneration, degraded area and natural regeneration. Results showed that the numberof published studies was low, although increasing in the last decade. The majority of thestudies used more than one restoration technique or used natural perches as nuclei. Most ofthe studies were conducted in the Americas and by Brazilian researches. Many studies werenot published as papers in scientific journals, but were available as master thesis or mono-graphs. Natural and artificial perches, soil transposition and natural regeneration were themost successful techniques. The number of nucleation studies must increase and spreadthrough the world, and their results need to be published to help other researches in theenvironmental restoration.