The frequent forest disturbance caused by natural factors and human activities has very important effects on forest resources management, climate change and some other fields. Under the background of global warming, researches on forest disturbance monitoring and its corresponding influence have become one of the hot topics both in China and abroad. Based on a detailed analysis of the previous studies, this paper has reviewed the progress of monitoring methods for the large-area forest disturbance by using Landsat satellite imagery, which mainly include wall- to - wall mapping, sampling mapping and data fusion with the image of low spatial resolution. The advantages and disadvantages of these methods as well as the possible research prospects in the future are also dis-cussed.