Soil loss is one of the world’s most critical environmental problems, and presents a key challenge to human sustainable development. So it is vital to understand how to control soil loss. There are many soil conservation measures, in which plant cover has been given special attention. According to previous research, the relationship between vegetation and soil loss was generalized through the three scales of patch, hillslope and watershed/region. At the patch scale, vegetation can greatly reduce or eliminate the energy from rainfall and runoff flow. It also can improve soil properties and soil structure under vegetation, and then decrease soil erodibility and increase infiltration capacity to reduce soil loss. In addition, vegetation types, vegetation structures and vegetation morphology also have direct influences on soil loss. At the hillslope scale, research has focused mainly on such aspects as the influence of slope position, slope degree and slope aspect on vegetation growth and distribution patterns. Other issues discussed include soil loss processes and patterns, influences of bare soil-vegetation mosaics and banded vegetation patterns on soil loss, and designing indices indicating runoff and soil loss processes and patterns. Most authors studied vegetation restoration and its effects on soil loss, and provide much valuable information on degraded ecosystem restoration and ecological security pattern design. At the watershed/region scale, the relationship between vegetation and soil loss is mainly controlled by climate and geomorphology characteristics, thus most studies concentrate on aspects of land cover (vegetation cover) and its effects on soil loss. Because of the difficulty in making observations at a large scale, remote sensing monitoring, GIS integration and model simulation are the main subjects and they can greatly help design regional ecological security pattern. In general, the previous research provides a large quantity of available knowledge for ecological conservation and environmental protection, however, there still exist some deficiencies, which need much more investigation. These deficiencies are analyzed so as to make suggestions for future studies on the relationship between vegetation and soil loss.