Desertification research in Argentina

Abstract

Latin America, Argentina is second -behind Brazil- in extent of drylands: 55 percent of its territory. Research on desertification and dryland degradation has a lengthy tradition, being undertaken even prior to the establishment of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. The paper aims to analyse desertification research in Argentina, the disciplines from which its knowledge arises and the topics receiving greater attention. The work focuses on the results from descriptive, bibliometric and social network analyses of a sample of articles on desertification in scientific journals indexed in Web of Science. A visual representation of citation relationships was created considering keywords such as: "desertification", "dry*land*", "*arid", and "development", "policy" or "economy" among others, in Argentina. According to this search, the number of papers per year dealing with desertification in Argentina is only 4.3. National knowledge, usually categorized as traditional knowledge, is barely captured by international databases. The challenge for the scientific community is to make traditional knowledge visible and disseminate the findings. Results demonstrate that desertification research in Argentina is in a great proportion related to studies of soil erosion and soil degradation, and only in a minor proportion to socioeconomic issues. However, desertification problems are the outcome of interactions among physical-biological, socioeconomic and political dimensions, and therefore the science summoned to analyse them must not only be a science centred on isolated themes but also one resulting from interdisciplinary studies and integrated approaches. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.