Purpose: Vegetation is a typical sensitive indicator of climate change, and therefore provides theoretical and valuable information for addressing issues arising from climate change including improving soil ecosystem services. Exploring how vegetation responses to climate change has become one of major hotspots of research. However, few scholars have performed bibliometric analyses of this field. This study investigated the current research activities and the trend developments of vegetation responses to climate change. Materials and methods: We conducted a quantitative bibliometric analysis of 2,310 publications on vegetation responses to climate change from 1991 to 2021 retrieved in the Web of Science Core Collection. The analysis comprised significant journals, disciplines, and scholars, as well as partnerships between countries and institutions, keyword co-occurrence and burst analysis. The bibliometric analysis tools, Histcite, Vosviewer, CiteSpace software, and R (Bibliometrix package), were applied. Results and discussion: The related publications on vegetation responses to climate change had been increasing exponentially in the past 30 years and its total global cited score reached its peak in 2010. The USA and China were the leading countries, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences having the highest number of publications and citations. The scholars who had the most citations were Allen CD, Bresears DD, and Running SW. Six research clusters were generated by keywords co-occurrence analysis, including impact, response, CO₂, growth, climate change, and vegetation. These clusters represented the current research topics that highlighted the responses of vegetation to climate change, the manifestation of its impact, and coping strategies. In future research on vegetation, the emphasis is expected to be placed on “human activities” and “N₂O emission”. Conclusion: This study has performed a comprehensive and systematic and quantitative analysis of the publications on the responses of vegetation to climate change. The results reveal the characteristics, development patterns, and research trends of studies on vegetation activity in response to climate change, which sheds new insights into understanding the relationship between soil and climate.

The outburst of Zhuonai Lake (ZL) in 2011 changed the local hydro-ecological system in northeast Hoh Xil (HX). This study focuses on the impact of the outburst on lake water storage changes (LWSCs) of four lakes in this region. Monthly LWSC from 2009 to 2016 were constructed using Landsat and Cryosat-2 data. We determined and validated lake levels and areas derived from Cryosat-2 and Landsat data, respectively. The two satellite-derived sequences were merged by interpolation to compute LWSC, based on the level-area curve derived from the digital elevation model (DEM). Results reveal the apparent impact of the outburst on the hydrological system. Before the outburst, water volumes in all four lakes continuously grew from January 2009 to September 2011, with a total increase of 1.49 ± 0.08 Gt. Most increased water was distributed in ZL and Kusai Lake (KL). The LWSC of each lake was strongly correlated (>0.9) with those of the whole basin. However, from October 2011 to December 2016, there was no ascending trend in LWSC of the three upper stream lakes, although the water volume in the basin was still increasing. More than 80% of the increased water flowed into Salt Lake (SL). Only the LWSC of SL kept a high correlation (0.91) with those of the whole basin.