Abstract: Along with rapid development in socity and economy, ecosystem and environment become increasingly important. Traditional reservoir operation oriented at economic benefits and flood control has gradually transformed into ecological operation, and further toward comprehensive operation. Presently, most of the river basins in the world have different degrees of ecological problems, which are increasingly prominent, and more efforts are attracted to studies in ecological reservoir regulation. This type of regulation means to incorporate ecological factors into the traditional operation on the premise of meeting basic human water demands, aimed at restoring or maintaining the ecosystem of rivers. This paper discusses concepts of river ecological water demand and ecological regulation and analyzes ecological scheduling approaches considering a variety of ecological factors: ecological flow, sediment condition, and water quality, etc. Comprehensive dispatching of reservoirs is also discussed and its frontiers and future development are pointed out.