Forest ecosystem plays a quietly significant role in maintaining earth ecological balance which is closely interrelated to sustainable development of human life (e.g., fresh water supply, climate-change mitigation, and timber production). With a series of scientific, social and political issues brought by global climate change, forest ecology research has gradually become a hot topic since the mid-20th century, and people increasingly recognized it a valuable issue to study. However, little is known about how forest ecology developed from a long-term span. Thus, understanding the development trend and characteristics in forest ecology research can be helpful to acquire more tailored and holistic knowledge in this area based on a panoramic and multi-dimensional view. In this study, the relevant literature in the core collection of the Web of Science database was used as the data source. Literature related to forest ecology research from 1905 to 2014 was collected and the bibliographic information obtained was analyzed with the help of DDA (Derwent Data Analyzer), SCI2 (Science of Science) and EXCEL. This paper comprehensively explored the development trend, research strength and topic evolution in forest ecology in the past 110 years from three aspects: the overall development trend (i.e., research output, international collaboration and topic similarity), the research output distribution in different stages, the time sequence of high frequency words and the research topics of highly-cited papers. The results showed that (1) on the whole, from the perspective of the overall development trend, forest ecology research has been remained an active state since the beginning of the 20th century, and the research history of global forest ecology could be divided into five stages, i.e., incubation period, cultivation period, acceleration period, evolution period and outbreak period according to the growth characteristics of the papers; (2) from the perspective of international scientific research cooperation, large, medium and small scale cooperation networks had been formed among different countries, among which the United States played a leading role and had established close cooperative relations with many countries; (3) from the perspective of topic similarity, there was coexistence of similarities and differences between different countries; (4) the United States ranked first in the output of papers in different stages, and the United States Forest Service, Chinese Academy of Science and Oregon State University formed the main research strength to lead and promote forest ecology research. In addition, different countries and institutions revealed the characteristic of “alternate rise”, “explosive rise” and “continuous decline” in different stages; and (5) the topic evolution analysis of high frequency words and highly-cited papers suggested a characteristic as “dynamic”, which means being highly related to ecological development. The research topics in different stages showed stronger interdisciplinary characteristics, including the intersection of near-source disciplines and remote-source disciplines. This indicated that the scientific issues of forest ecology tend to be deeper and more complex, and the scientific researches tend to be integrated under the background of the development of society, ecology, science and technology, and the community of human destiny. It can be predicted that the study of international cooperation in forest ecology will be further deepened as entering the stage of ecological civilization and the popularity of the concept of the community of human destiny. Additionally, based on the in-depth concept of “carbon neutrality”, the “carbon neutrality” research in forest ecosystems will provide data basis and scientific methods for policy formulation and implementation.