Research progress on urban wetland restoration in China over the past two decades from the perspective of scientific knowledge mapping

As essential components of the urban ecosystem, urban wetlands provide irreplaceable ecological, economic, and social values. They perform critical ecosystem service, including water purification, flood regulation, climate regulation, biodiversity maintenance, material production, and cultural recreation. However, during rapid urbanization, wetlands have faced increasing pressures, such as water quality degradation, sharp declines in biodiversity, and the degradation of ecological functions. Therefore, strengthening the ecological restoration of urban wetlands is of paramount importance in the context of building a ‘Beautiful China’. Based on the core databases of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Web of Science (WoS), this study employed CiteSpace software to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the research progress and existing shortcomings in urban wetland ecological restoration in China. The results reveal three critical findings. Research activity in this field is highly coupled with regional socio-economic levels and resource endowments, showing a significant spatial imbalance. Although China’s wetland ecological restoration research has established a relatively complete logical framework addressing ‘why to restore, how to restore, and how to access restoration effectiveness’, and has evolved from theoretical construction toward sustainable development paradigms, notable weaknesses persist in adaptive management approaches. Current research predominantly emphasizes specialized technologies and demonstration cases, lacking customized solutions for diverse urban contexts and standardized long-term maintenance mechanisms. Furthermore, insufficient attention to ecosystem resilience remains a key research gap. There is an urgent need to develop cross-scale restoration pathways that integrate localized practices with intelligent monitoring systems, thereby bridging the critical knowledge gap between scientific restoration and sustainable long-term management. While the core of China’s wetland ecological restoration research demonstrates strong multidisciplinary characteristics, particularly in ecosystem services assessment, the various sub-fields maintain weak interconnections. The limited cross-fertilization between disciplines hinders knowledge integration and methodological innovation. To achieve ‘frontier breakthroughs’ through emerging paradigms, the field must actively identify and incorporate keywords representing novel technologies and approaches. Future research should strengthen studies on representative urban wetlands, such as those in the northeast marshlands and the northwest arid regions, enhance the practice pathways of localized urban wetland protection concepts, explore collaborative promotion strategies for restoration measures, and integrate intelligent technology to improve the prediction, assessment, and resilience management of wetland evolution. These efforts will facilitate the paradigm shift from ‘scientific restoration’ to ‘long-term management’.