Mountainous areas provide diverse ecosystem services in many aspects,including biodiversity maintenance, regional climate regulation and water conservation.The retrieval of biophysical variables in mountainous areas faces more challenges in technology and theory compared to that in flat terrain.These challenges derive from the significant surface heterogeneity and the lack of appropriate models for radiative transfer and ecological process.The related research progresses and key theory and techniques in montanic biophysical variables retrieval were reviewed in this paper.Further improvement of retrieval accuracy calls for paradigm shift in modeling,observation and data processing in mountainous areas.