Homogeneização biótica em ecossistemas urbanos: análise bibliométrica de tendências de pesquisa e colaborações globais (2000–2024)

Abstract

Urbanization profoundly alters the composition and structure of biological communities, often favoring generalist, cosmopolitan, and disturbance-tolerant species at the expense of more sensitive native species. This process can increase compositional similarity among originally distinct communities, characterizing urban biotic homogenization. Although its ecological effects are widely recognized, comprehensive bibliometric syntheses integrating temporal dynamics, collaboration patterns, and conceptuais shifts within a single analytical framework remain scarce. In this study, we analyzed 472 publications retrieved from the Web of Science using the search query “biotic homogeni*” AND “urba*”, covering the period from 2000 to 2024, using the Bibliometrix package to reconstruct the field’s growth, geography, collaboration structure, and thematic organization. Our results show that the literature expanded substantially after 2006, reached its highest annual output in 2021 with 45 publications, and became strongly concentrated in the recent period, with 83.90% of records published after 2012. Nevertheless, bibliometric influence remains heavily concentrated in earlier studies. The corpus accumulated 23,545 citations, while articles published between 2000 and 2009 accounted for 41.1% of total citations despite representing only 11.4% of publications. The United States occupies a dominant position in productivity and impact, with 119 publications, 11,343 citations, and an h-index of 39, whereas China and Brazil show greater reliance on international co-authorship. Conceptually, the field is organized around biodiversity, biological invasions, and ecological change, with a trajectory characterized by a shift from predominantly taxonomic and non-native speciescentered approaches toward perspectives involving beta diversity, habitat, and functionality. These patterns indicate the maturation of research on urban biotic homogenization, with a progressive expansion of the ecological dimensions investigated, although geographic concentration in scientific production and asymmetries in collaboration networks persist.