Impact of climate change and drought on land cover: A literature overview from Web of Science Core Collection

Climate change driven by natural and anthropogenic factors significantly affects land cover dynamics and accelerates land degradation and desertification worldwide. Drought, as a major consequence of climate change, increasingly threatens ecosystem stability and sustainable land management. Therefore, this study aimed to perform a bibliometric analysis of global research on the impacts of climate change and drought on land cover using publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database. The literature search was conducted on June 8, 2025 using the keywords “climate change”, “drought” and “land cover”. An initial dataset of 2937 publications was identified and filtered by language (English), document type (Article) and publication period (2016–2025), resulting in 732 articles for final analysis. VOSviewer and MapChart applied for bibliometric visualization and network analysis. The results indicated that publication output peaked in 2021, accounting for 14 % of total publications, while Chinese researchers led the field with a 14.8 % contribution. The Journal of Hydrology emerged as the leading publication source and Environmental Sciences and Ecology dominated the subject areas with 85.6 % coverage. The findings highlight growing interdisciplinary interest and reveal important geographical and thematic research gaps requiring stronger international collaboration.

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