Abstract:Ever since Darwin, competiton has been considered to be one of the major forces that shape the morphology and life-history of plants and affect the structure and dynamics of plant communities. Because it plays a central role in ecology, plant competition has been studied in a variety of facets, which has led to the development of the whole ecologists. We bring this review to offer our commonplace remarks so that others may come up with valuable opinions. In doing so, we discuss over definition of competition, current life history theories and future research directions while this review places an emphasis on the experimental approaches to studying competition, on how biological and environmental factors affect the competitive outcomes, and on the consequences of intra-and inter-specific competition, especially how it affects the strurcture and dynamics of plant communities. It is hoped that this review can provide the current knowledge in this field and the impetus for the development of new and more general approaches.