Abstract: Litter, as a principal resource for improving forest quality, plays a major role in the sustaining of ecosystem function, including nutrient return, soil and water conservation, toxic substances filtration, food resource of animals and microorganisms, seed germination, keeping temperature and humidity of surface soil. Spatial variation of litter nutrients refers to the difference and diversity of litter nutrients in different spatial locations within a certain region, which could affect community distribution and is a common but very important feature in forest ecosystems. Here, we reviewed the spatial variation of forest litter nutrients and its relationship with natural and anthropogenic factors. Current research on the spatial variation of forest litter nutrients gave priority to the two quantitative description methods (classical statistics and geostatistics), involved community, landscape, regional, and global scales, and related to factors such as plant, soil, terrain, climate, forest structure, and disturbances. The results of spatial variation of forest litter varied with methods, objects, purposes, research areas or scales of different studies. Therefore, we need to strengthen studies on the standardization and comprehensive application of quantitative methods and select appropriate methods to describe spatial variation. It is worthy to investigate the spatial variation of forest litter and its relation to environmental factors at multiplescale for the determination of research scales and corresponding affecting factors.