Unveiling Latent Themes in Habitat Suitability Research (1947-2024)

AbstractAim: Habitat suitability (HS) studies play a crucial role in guiding conservation strategies, identifying critical areas for protection, and promoting sustainable development practices that align with global biodiversity targets. We examined the latent theme from 38,746 HS related documents indexed in the Scopus database between 1947 and 2024. We investigated the publication trends, latent words transition, keywords, and graph of their co-occurrence and co-authorship countries, unsupervised latent topics, dominant research species and kingdoms.Location: Global.Time Period: 1947-2024Major Taxa studies: Animal, Archaea, Bacteria, Chromista, Fungi, Plant, Protozoa.Method: The first digit Benford test was used to the annual publication trend for examining data reliability. A statistical topic modeling technique, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model (LDA), was adopted to examine the latent topics. Species scientific names were mined from the abstract of the articles using binomial nomenclature pattern phrases and mapped to the global biodiversity information facility (GBIF) taxonomy.Results: We observed an increasing trend of publications and were statistically reliable (<i>P-value</i> &gt; 0.308) that followed Benford law. United states of America was dominant in research followed by People Republic of China and United Kingdom. The collaboration of authors was also in increasing trend with an average of 4.35 (SD:4.16) authors per document. The latent words species, habitat and area and manuscript keywords like habitat quality, habitat selection animals and ecosystem were frequently adopted. The ecological modeling, habitat suitability, bioactivity and integrity, species interactions, habitat quality and taxonomy environmental modeling like six thematic topics were observed from the LDA model. While mapping the scientific name of extracted species to GBIF database, animal kingdom research was dominated by plants, fungi and chromistan.Main Conclusions: This study reveals the substantial taxonomic inequities and thematic convergence in HS research, offering insights for scientists, conservationists, and decision-makers working toward sustainable environment and conservation management.