The study on the ecological efficiency of forestry industry can accurately show the current sustainable development level of forestry industry in South China, which has a great significant meaning for the development of forestry industry and the construction of ecological civilization. In this paper, Non-radial Directional Distance Function(NDDF) is used to measure the ecological efficiency of forestry industry in southern forest regions (13 provinces) from 2005 to 2016, by analyzing Spatio-temporal characteristics. Then, resource efficiency and environmental efficiency of each province are compared and analyzed. Finally, Variable Coefficient Model is used to make empirical analysis on the influencing factors of different provinces. The results showed that:(1)from 2005 to 2016, the overall ecological efficiency of the forest industry in southern China showed a slow increasing trend, with the highest average of ecological efficiency in Guangdong, followed by Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the last three in Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan; the average value of ecological efficiency of forestry industry in nine provinces such as Anhui, Guangxi and Guizhou is lower than 0.5,which indicates that the overall level of ecological efficiency of forestry industry is relatively low with significant differences; according to the temporal and spatial evolution, the gap between the central region and the eastern region is gradually narrowing, but the overall level of the western region is relatively low and still can make a great improvement, which is basically similar to the echelon distribution of economic strength of each province.(2)The key to improve the ecological efficiency of the forestry industry is environmental efficiency, especially in the central and western regions, where there is still more room for improvement,compared with the eastern regions. Among them, emission reduction priorities are the emission efficiency of waste gas and solid waste.(3)Environmental regulation has the greatest impact on the ecological efficiency of forestry industry, followed by marketization, which is the second largest impact. The impact of forest coverage on the ecological efficiency of forestry industry is related to its own economic development level, and the impact of fixed asset investment on the ecological efficiency of forestry industry is the least significant. At the end of the paper, the limitations of the selection of research data and indicators and the key directions of future research are discussed in detail.