Abstract
With the development of science and technology, people's understanding of the environment has changed. The spiritual connection between humans and the environment is weakening. Stewardship is a concept involving emotions, attitudes, and value systems. It is used to address various challenges of sustainable development. The bibliometric analysis method was adopted to analyze the changes, focuses, trends, differences, and characteristics of Stewardship responsibilities in different countries, summarize their regional features, and indicate future research directions. Specifically, 2924 papers were screened from the Web of Science through keyword and literature filtering. The relationships between keywords and countries were analyzed through CiteSpace's collaboration networks and co-occurrence analysis. The research results indicate that according to the trend of historical literature publication, Stewardship research can be divided into three different developmental stages: the Embryonic stage, the Growth stage, and the Development and redefinition stage. Each stage has different research themes. Moreover, two central research areas of Stewardship (Ecology/Methods and Practices) and three characteristics (Sense of place/Active collaboration/Feasibility) were summarized in this study.
