Land carrying capacity is an important indicator on the assessment of land resources. The authors reviewed the progress in study on land carrying capacity calculating methods. The land carrying capacity calculating methods are classified into three categories, including environmental element potentiality method (environmental element step-up method and integrated climatic element model method ), vegetation potentiality method and systematic dynamics method. Their applying scope,
advantage, limits and future prospects are also discussed, of which the first method is used frequently in many literatures and have formed some fixed models, but these models all have their definite applying scope; the second method, that is to get the growing information of crops by means of the remote sense (RS) and estimate the land productivity, its advantage is to get the necessary information quickly and exactly and do dynamic estimate, but in order to the exactness we should build the integrated model combining RS and non-RS information; the applying of systematic dynamics method can compute the population carrying capacity of an area dynamically, which is what other methods can' t provide. In a word, the new technique such as remote sense(RS) and geographical information system(GIS) will apply to the research area of land carrying capacity.