The close interactions between abiotic and biotic components create a variety of three-dimensional (3-D) landscape patterns. Landscape ecology, as a discipline of studying patterns and ecological processes, has made rapid progress in the exploration of 3-D space with the improvement of data acquirement ability, such as lidar technology. The real surface landscape can be described considering 3-D data, which improves the consistency between landscape indices and ecological process, and has overcome the shortage of ecological meanings of traditional researches. However, the lack of universality of methods and conclusions still exist due to different study backgrounds. The sensitivities of research results will increase with the expansion from two-dimensional to 3-D scale because of the increasing data quantity and accuracy. How to select and process the suitable scaled data to get more scientific conclusions need to be discussed in the future. The integration of multi-scale, multi-source and a long time series data will be the study trend with data acquisition becoming more convenient. In addition to the dynamic monitoring and prediction studies, the sustainable and ecological restoration application combined with landscape planning and design will be an important research direction.