The river overbank deposits are of critical importance for the research of the watershed environment. In recent years,researches of the watershed environment based on overbank deposits have involved the evolution of watershed environment,paleoflood,environmental archaeology,and the pollution history and environmental background of the watershed.In this paper,the main progress in the research of the overbank sediments and related depositional environment since the nineteen-eighties are reviewed.Emphases are given to the summeries and analysises on the diversity and depositional characteristics of overbank deposits,multi-environmental proxies and their significances,overbank deposits and related paleoflooding deposits,and the relation between overbank flooding and environmental pollution.The results show that the overbank deposits are quite complicated and diverse,and great achievements have been made in the research of paleoflood and watershed environmental pollution recorded by the overbank deposits.In the future, more attention should be payed to the fields of overbank deposits and related climate change,the characteristic and origin of the overbank deposits.As there are numberous rivers with clearly regional differences,the researches of the overbank deposits and sedimentary environment in China are promising.