With the intensified interference of human activities with natural ecosystems, research in disturbance was attached with great importance in resent years again. Ecological researchers have carried out numerous researches in disturbance at various scales, such as global, regional, local, and landscape, ecosystem, vegetation, population and even species. On the relationship between vegetation and disturbance, when the adaptation of plants to disturbance was intensively studied, the impacts of disturbance on the structure, process and function of ecosystem were scrutinized by ecologists. Multi-factors disturbance and the restoration of vegetation after disturbed are popularly identified as the key aspect of disturbance and vegetation research.
Disturbance research is facing a great number of challenges, such as inference of a result from specific study to a universal conclusion, uncomparability between case studies, methodological limitation and limitation of knowledge of vegetation. Most of the present researches were implemented for the purposes of data collection (for supplying data for integrated study), verification (for testing some proposals or hypotheses) and practice (supplying information for vegetation restoration). Thus, the greatest challenge to the ecologists is to probe the adaptive mechanism of vegetation to disturbance and prediction of the global vegetation dynamics.