Because of the increasing demands for soil and water conservation policy-making, progress in soil erosion science and increasing global change in recent years, research into the quantitative assessment and modeling of regional soil erosion has taken on great importance. Recent research outcomes include soil erosion surveys at global, regional and national scales; establishing processes and scale effects in regional soil erosion, extraction of factors underlying regional soil erosion and the development of regional soil erosion models. The trend in quantitative regional soil erosion research is to treat regional soil erosion as a component of general land surface processes and take into account the effects of global change on regional erosion. Successful outcomes have used integrated remote sensing and GIS technologies with distributed regional soil erosion models to produce quantitative evaluations of soil erosion characteristics at multiple scales. This paper discusses the state of current quantitative assessment of regional soil erosion and suggests that further intensive study is needed in (1) quantitative analysis of regional soil erosion processes using spatio-temporal scaling approaches, (2) development of distributed regional soil erosion models, (3) dynamic analysis and prediction of regional erosion, (4) the relationships between soil erosion and the effects of global change, and (5) establishment of information infrastructure for data processing and management.