Research progress and hotspot analysis of marine ecological restoration

Marine ecological restoration is an important way to halt the degradation of marine ecosystems, and has attracted more and more attention from scholars around the world. Used Science Citation Index Expanded （SCIE）database as data source, bibliometric method and VOSviewer visual analysis software were applied to quantitatively analyze the literature of marine ecological restoration published in 1980-2019 and to clarify the research development，frontier hotspots and future directions in the past 40 years. The results show that the number of published papers on marine ecological restoration has increased significantly year by year in the past 40 years, especially it accelerated after 2000. The publications were mainly contributed by scholars from North American, Oceania and European countries, among them the United States took the lead. The research on marine ecological restoration involves multiple disciplines，mainly including environmental science, ecology, marine and freshwater biology, and Journal of Coastal Research,Restoration Ecology,Ecological Engineering and Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science are important journals of the subject. The main research hotspots include vegetation restoration, marine life population recovery, coastal wetland restoration and biogeochemistry, climate change and ecosystem management. Increasing attention is paid to the mitigation and adaptation of climate change, the natural restoration of ecosystems, and the improvement of ecosystem services. Thus marine ecological restoration will be a hotsport in the near future. With the opening of the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the deepening of marine ecological civilization construction, the marine ecological restoration research will step in a new stage of rapid development of China. Therefore it is suggested that study on the marine ecological restoration in response to climate change, the regional-scale marine ecosystem restoration planning, the marine ecological degradation mechanisms and key restoration techniques, and the adaptive management be strengthened.