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As the carrier and theoretical base of life community consisting of mountain-water-forest-field-lake-grass, watershed and watershed ecology are playing increasingly important roles in the construction of national ecological civilization. The structure-process-function-mechanism-regulation of watershed ecosystem and progressively variable emphasis on these contents is the research paradigm of watershed ecology, and the quantification of spatial structure and the construction of corresponding index systems are key to carry out quantitative research in watershed ecology. However, watershed ecology has not established its own endogenous model framework of index systems to describe the spatial structure of watershed ecosystem, which is able to make a close link between the structural components of watershed ecosystem, between land and water body, between upstream and downstream, or between terrestrial and aquatic organisms. The researches in watershed ecology are scattered in freshwater ecology, terrestrial ecosystem ecology, soil and water conservation, water conservancy engineering, agricultural environmental science, etc. The core theory of watershed ecology has not been significantly developed till now. Therefore, the bottleneck in the development of watershed ecology and the research methods and achievements of the quantitative characteristics of spatial structure describing watershed ecosystem were analyzed based on geography and landscape ecology. The progress on the quantitative characteristics of spatial structure describing watershed ecosystem developed with hierarchical mechanism theory and meta-ecosystem theory was also discussed. In order to provide methodology to quantify the spatial structure of watershed ecosystem and relationships between structural components in watershed ecosystem, the overall index and indices of structural components and structural component relationships of watershed ecosystem were suggested. The index systems will be of great scientific value for coupling quantitative research, estimation and application of watershed ecology on life community consisting of mountain-water-forest-field-lake-grass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]