Avian influenza is a serious and harmful infectious disease which probably impact public health, social economy, and political stability. Recently, regional issues of ecological security caused by the risk of avian influenza have increasingly attracted much concern in the scientific community, especially in the fields of public health security and biological safety. Therefore, it's necessary to review regional ecological security assessment from the angle of the risk of avian influenza. In this respect, available peer-reviewed papers of avian influenza and ecological security assessment from the Web of Science during 1996-2017 were comprehensively analyzed to understand the related research progress using the Citespace software. After clarifying the relationship between the risk of avian influenza and ecological security assessment, by combing the theoretical framework of ecological security assessment, we compared the related merits, drawbacks, data sources and applicable scope of the approaches of avian influenza risk assessment and ecological security evaluation based on the risk of avian influenza. The result of this review paper showed that the threat of the risk of avian influenza on biological safety and public health security has greatly impacted regional ecological security. The avian influenza induced public health crisis and biodiversity loss are important research contents of ecological security. It is thus necessary and urgent to assess ecological security from the aspect of the risk of avian influenza and strength the investigation of model development and its applications. In addition, current avian influenza-related studies have largely been conducted in the fields of virology and epidemiology. However, integrated investigation and analysis between avian influenza and ecological security is generally scanty, let alone assess regional ecological security based on the risk of avian influenza. This study will contribute to providing scientific evidence to reveal the dynamic mechanisms of the occurrence and spread, prevention and monitoring, and regional ecological security assessment based on the risk of avian influenza.