Bibliometric analysis of remote sensing-based crop climate vulnerability: trends and perspectives

Climate change is intensifying droughts, heatwaves, and hydrological extremes, increas-ing crop vulnerability and threatening global food security. This study analyzes the scien-tific evolution of research on remote sensing-based crop climate vulnerability, with em-phasis on temporal, geographical, and thematic patterns. A quantitative, exploratory, de-scriptive, longitudinal, and retrospective bibliometric approach was applied to 2,343 documents indexed in Scopus between 1985 and 2026. The dataset was processed using Bibliometrix 5.1.1 and VOSviewer 1.6.20 to evaluate productivity, impact, collaboration, and intellectual structure, including Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS). Re-sults show a sustained annual growth rate of 4%, with 627 sources, 10,408 authors, an average of 5.17 co-authors per document, 35.3% international collaboration, and 19.93 ci-tations per document. China, the United States, and India lead scientific production, while key journals concentrate dissemination. Thematic analysis highlights the dominance of drought-related studies and the increasing importance of machine learning and cloud-based platforms such as Google Earth Engine. The findings indicate that the field has reached a stage of scientific and technological maturity, transitioning from descriptive monitoring toward predictive and operational geospatial intelligence. However, chal-lenges remain in methodological integration, geographical representation, and the trans-lation of scientific outputs into decision-oriented tools for agricultural adaptation.