Abstract: Soil seed banks (SSBs) represents potential resource reserves for future species diversity in terrestrial ecosystem, and plays an important role in the storage of species and genetic diversity. Global changes and human activities have important impacts on soil seed banks, while current studies mainly focused on the response of soil seed banks to small scales (region) or single influencing factors. Comprehensive understanding on the response of soil seed banks to global changes and human activities, was limited by small scale (region) or lack of the multi-factor coupling. In this review, a total of 7606 related articles were retrieved from databases of CNKI and Web of Science, ranged from 1980 to 9th February 2022, and a bibliometrics were conducted, to summarize the study progress and guide the future study on soil seed banks. The research of soil seed banks suggested that global changes (temperature, precipitation change and atmospheric nitrogen deposition) and human activities (soil use change, fenced, grazing and ecology restoration) have direct or indirect effects on composition and size (density) of soil seed banks. The role of soil seed banks in restoring degraded ecosystems remains unresolved. It suggests that four major directions of study in soil seed banks that still needs to be paid more attention: (1) Standardize the sampling methods of soil seed banks, including sampling time, sampling size, and sampling depth, and establish a complete research methods systems; (2) Establish long-term field positioning observation and experimental station to study the change characteristics of SSBs on time and space scales; (3) Research on multi-factor interaction effects under global changes and human activities; (4) Based on the observation data of long-term, developing the models to predict and quantify the future restoration potential of soil seed banks to plant communities and ecosystems in the context of multiple factors.

Key words: soil seed banks, global changes, human activities, ecology restoration, review