Abstract: A plant community is an assemblage of plant populations that live in certain area, and interact with and adapt to one another in the context of long-term environmental changes. Plant communities maintain global ecosystem functions, and provide food and habitats for animals and other organisms. Plant communities also provide primary resources for human survival and development, and are therefore indispensable to human societies. China is among the countries with the most diverse plant communities in the world. However, no systematic national inventory has been conducted for Chinese plant communities. This fact obstructs exploitation and protection of China’s plant resources, and also hampers the development of the fields of Chinese ecology and geography. There is an urgent need to survey Chinese plant communities using consis-tent methods and protocols. In this paper, we review major concepts in plant community ecology, and pro-pose a framework for developing plant community inventories based on recent progress in community ecol-ogy and our own experience with long-term field surveys. Our framework provides protocols for site selec-tion and plot design, items to be measured in a plot, and measurements of functional traits of dominant spe-cies. We also review protocols for field surveys of large, long-term plots. The protocols proposed in this pa-per are expected to be a base for standardizing methodology for inventory of Chinese plant communities.