Stalwarts who globally shaped the concept and science called agroforestry

Agroforestry is  a sustainable and efficient land management system deliberately combining crops, trees and sometimes livestock. Agroforestry is an age-old practice that has recently evolved as a scientific discipline to address the issues of land degradation, poverty and climate change in addition to the primary function of addressing the livelihood and economic security of the farming community.  Nowadays, agroforestry is an alternate land use system for sustainability and acts as a platform for effectively harnessing the agriculture and forestry and livestock components. Several scientists shaped the agroforestry by addressing diverse kinds of practices involving tree-crop-animal combinations such as slash and burn agriculture, biological amelioration of degraded soil, soil-health improvement by alley cropping, benefits of different agroforestry system such as homegarden, agrisilviculture and silvopastures, species richness and ecosystem services, carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation,  provision of NTFP's, adaptation and mitigation of present and future climatic vulnerabilities, mitigation of GHG emission and delivery of ecosystem services. Despite the understanding of agroforestry as an age-old practice, recent decades has seen its transformation into a distinguished scientific discipline. This mainstreaming of agroforestry involve the collective efforts of number of scientists in the country of which the individual commitments and contribution from some stalwarts are worth mentioning. An insight into their contributions in the research and academic persuits in shaping up agroforestry will enlighten the academicians, policymakers and more importantly, students to get inspired to work for agroforestry. With this, snapshot of bibliometric analysis on "agroforestry" was carried out during the period 2001-2022 to understand the periodic progression in agroforestry research overtime and the associtated countries and scientists