A sustainable and effective monitoring of the environment is necessary to assess its current status. In particular, marine ecosystems are more and more subjected to external inputs and pollutants in general, which may considerably affect their biodiversity and the regularity of their processes, with consequences on the global system. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles are frequently used to perform research and monitoring operations, being usually more cost-effective and less time-consuming than the traditional methods. In this study, the global scientific literature on the employment of AUVs for the environment is explored. The bibliometric analysis on the networks between authors, countries, journals and keywords related to the topic allowed to verify the major research interests and assess the current weaknesses on which researcher are currently focused. This approach proved to be a promising way for exploring the scientific literature by applying systems thinking in bibliometric science
