Ecosystem service flow, which has been concerned by researchers recently, is significant in the process of the generation, delivery, transformation and maintenance of ecosystem services, and can be seen as a linkage between the provision of ecosystem services and human demands. Material demands of humans show a non-linear increase under the situation of sharp growth of population and the rapid development of economy and society. So at the time when humans enjoy the benefit that is brought by ecosystem service flow, they also give pressure on the flow. In this article, we reviewed the connotation and attributes of ecosystem service flow that include its definition, classification, spatial-temporal scales, carrier characteristics and quantitative attributes. We also analyzed the influencing mechanism of human activities to ecosystem service flow, such as, positive and negative activities can affect the spatial units, delivery carriers and quantitative attributes of ecosystem service flow, thus impacting the specific flow and finally, human well-being. In addition, we discussed the contributions of positive activities (i.e. valuation and risk assessment of ecosystem service flow, conservation planning of ecosystem service flow, recovery and restoration of ecosystem service flow) to the sustainable delivering function of ecosystem service flow. Therefore, appropriate integrating management of ecosystem service flow can be established by investigating attenuation of path carriers, or using the processing system of multi-scale analysis and the dynamic coupling model of ecosystem service flow transmitting networks. Research on the interacting relationship between human activities and ecosystem service flow can provide efficient conservation and restoration to the degraded ecosystem service flow, and will also establish a solid foundation for future research.