National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The MODIS LAI/FPAR products have been widely used in various fields since their first public release in 2000. This review intends to summarize the history, development trends, scientific collaborations, disciplines involved, and research hotspots of these products. Its aim is to intrigue researchers and stimulate new research direction. Based on literature data from the Web of Science (WOS) and associated funding information, we conducted a bibliometric visualization review of the MODIS LAI/FPAR products from 1995 to 2020 using bibliometric and social network analysis (SNA) methods. We drew the following conclusions: (1) research based on the MODIS LAI/FPAR shows an upward trend with a multiyear average growth rate of 24.9% in the number of publications. (2) Researchers from China and the USA are the backbone of this research area, among which the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is the core research institution. (3) Research based on the MODIS LAI/FPAR covers a wide range of disciplines but mainly focus on environmental science and ecology. (4) Ecology, crop production estimation, algorithm improvement, and validation are the hotspots of these studies. (5) Broadening the research field, improving the algorithms, and overcoming existing difficulties in heterogeneous surface, scale effects, and complex terrains will be the trend of future research. Our work provides a clear view of the development of the MODIS LAI/FPAR products and valuable information for scholars to broaden their research fields.