The rational and appropriate allocation as well as scientific management of water resource is the cardinal and crucial part of the sustainability of regional development and integrated watershed management.Water footprint, as a comprehensive accounting indicator, reflecting the consumption of water resource due to human activities, connects human water expenditure directly and tightly with water utilization, which can translates human appropriation of fresh water into the volume or mass of water, and thus provides vital scientific analysis grounds of the maintenance of watershed water resource security and the improvement of regional water utilization efficiency, and has already become one of the frontier research fields of international water resources management.Firstly, based on the definitions of water footprint and water ecological footprint, which are the derivations of ecological footprint, and have already been the two main models used to calculate human use of water resource, this paper made comparative studies on water footprint, ecological footprint and water ecological footprint.Their similarities and differences are analyzed from the following four aspects: the origins and aims, fundamentals, footprint components and model applications.The results show that ecological footprint model, especially in its accounts setting idea, has significant impacts on both water footprint and water ecological footprint model, and water ecological footprint is regarded as a new emerged component of ecological footprint.However, compared with water ecological footprint, water footprint is a more comprehensive indicator to calculate the total annual volume of fresh water used to produce goods and services for consumption, and thus it can play a more important role in water resource management.Furthermore, the methods to calculate water footprint in process, product and region dimensions were explicated.Secondly, this paper reviewed the recent main research progresses on water footprint both in China and overseas from the following several aspects: (1) the assessments of water footprint in product and region.More water footprints of processes and products are calculated and analyzed by foreign scholars, while case study of a region's water footprint are booming all over the world; (2) regional water resource security researches based on deep analyses of water footprint and some derived indices; (3) the sustainability assessments of regional water footprint by comparing the blue, green water footprint with available fresh water resource and comparing the grey water footprint with assimilative capacity of the watershed.Thirdly, this study proposed the key issues for further research, and the themes are as follows: (1) to make more comprehensive and integrated study on water footprint, including calculating and analyzing the quantity and structure of footprint, and then assessing the environmental, social and economic sustainability of water footprint, and finally making response plans, which are usually ignored; (2) to make further study on the uncertainty of water footprint calculation, which could enable scientists to make precise statements about the degree of confidence they have in their evaluation and simulation-based predictions; (3) to study the relationships between material flow accounting and water footprint, and make a joint research by integrating advantages from both of them; (4) to develop a multi-dimensional measure of sustainable development based on "footprint family", including ecological footprint, carbon footprint and water footprint, then human appropriation of natural capital like land resource, water resource and energy resource can be fully accounted.