Global climate change leads to gradual increases in the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme drought events, which reduces the resilience of forest ecosystems. It is urgent to explore and reveal the characteristics of forest responses to drought. Taking the quantification of drought as a starting point, this study summarizes common indicators, evaluation methods and application cases for understanding forest responses to drought. It also examines the impacts of inherent attributes (e.g. stand age and canopy height) on forest responses to drought. Based on the research progress, it is urgent to develop multi-scale comprehensive analysis to understand the driving mechanisms why the differences in attributes could lead to diverse forest responses to drought, deepen the research of detecting regime shift of forest ecosystem with different attributes and its tipping point, and develop the application of forest management practices and model optimization.