Global economic development and increasingly intensive human activities have brought severe challenges to already vulnerable ecosystems, thus, development and application of ecological restoration technologies that compliance with nature and environmentally friendly has been becoming an important component for achieving United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. Over the past decades, scientists and ecological restoration agencies around the world have developed lots of restoration technologies and modes, which have played important roles for rehabilitation of degraded ecosystems. However, selection and application of best technologies and practices have been limited from lack of methods and models for evaluation and assessment of the existing technologies, leading to overlapping and wasting of investment of funds and human resources to the development of the restoration technologies. This problem is more serious in China than the rest of the world, given that the Chinese government has been putting lots of funds to restoration of the degrading ecosystems since 2000, of which, about 214 core technologies, 64 models and more than 100 technological systems have been developed and adopted to restoration of the ecosystem that are degrading. There is a high need to develop methods and models that can be used to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of these existing restoration technologies. In line with such demand, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China launched a national key Research and Development program entitled "Methods and indicator systems for assessing ecological restoration technology, and evaluation of ecosystem rehabilitation approaches from around the world (grant number:2016YFC0503700)". This paper aims to make an overall review of the evaluation methods and indicator systems, define the characteristics of restoration technologies, propose the basic principles and steps for assessing restoration technologies, as well as the Three Phase Evaluation Method (THEM) for assessing ecological restoration technologies. It also introduces the 14 papers that are accepted in this thematic issue based on the progress that the project has partially achieved so far, which cover the perspectives related to evaluation of restoration technologies such as methods and techniques for evaluating the technologies, model development, and the pilot studies that applied these methods and models. It is expected that the publication of this thematic issue will contribute to the methodological development and selection of best restoration technologies and practices, improve the effectiveness of the technology application, and provide guidance on import and export of restoration technologies among different regions and countries.