The last two decades witnessed some major developments in the studies of the environmental changes since Last Glacial Maximum in the western countries. The current research characteristics have been summarised in this paper as followings:
    (1)More attentions have been payed to the precise dating and the fining of the time resolution;
    (2)The applications of the advantage techniques and methods have been emphazised;
    (3)The synthetic studies across different disciplines have become more and more important;
    (4)With the accumulation, the researchers in the western countries have begun to reconstruct the space patterns of environmental changes on continental or even global scales;
    (5)Simulation studies using models and investigation of the mechanism of paleoenvironment changes has been shown to be very valuable in the formation of the theory.