Toward climate-resilient date palm agriculture in the United Arab Emirates: a strategic triangulated knowledge mapping

The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) plays a vital role in food security, rural livelihoods, and cultural heritage in the hyper-arid United Arab Emirates (UAE). However, increasing climate stress, water scarcity, and persistent production constraints threaten the sector’s long-term resilience. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive understanding of existing research and its limitations. This study systematically maps the thematic structure of UAE date-palm research, identifies dominant knowledge domains, and highlights critical gaps hindering the transition toward climate-resilient and integrated agricultural systems. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, combining bibliometric analysis of 124 peer-reviewed articles (2005–2026) with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling to identify major thematic clusters. A complementary systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to validate findings and synthesize emerging research trajectories. The results reveal a mature, internationally collaborative research landscape structured around ten thematic clusters, with Date Palm Diseases and Control and Phytochemical and Nutritional Analysis emerging as dominant motor themes. Despite advances in water management, biomass valorization, and genomics, the field remains fragmented, with limited integration across technological, environmental, and socio-economic dimensions. Significant gaps persist, particularly in IoT and blockchain-enabled agricultural systems and in socio-technical studies of innovation adoption. This study provides an evidence-based roadmap, emphasizing unified socio-technical frameworks to support a sustainable and climate-resilient UAE date-palm sector. Graphical abstract