Abstract: Under the intensifying influence of global change and human activities, ecological restoration has emerged as a crucial strategy for achieving sustainable development goals. Current evaluation systems for assessing restoration effectiveness integrate multiple indicators across ecological, physical, and biological domains. Among these, soil nematodes have been widely applied in dynamic monitoring and evaluation of ecosystem restoration due to their exceptional sensitivity to environmental changes and strong functional indicative properties. As key members of soil fauna, nematodes occupy diverse trophic positions within soil food webs and exhibit rapid responses to alterations in soil conditions, making them particularly valuable as bioindicators of ecosystem health and restoration progress. This paper systematically reviews how various ecological restoration measures implemented across different regions of China, including vegetation restoration, soil amelioration practices, and adaptive management strategies, affect soil nematode community structure, diversity patterns, and ecological indices. The review synthesizes current knowledge on the response patterns of nematode communities throughout restoration processes and critically evaluates their advantages and limitations as biological indicators. The findings reveal that nematode ecological indices are becoming increasingly diverse for assessing ecosystem structure and function. Among the various nematode-based ecological indices, the enrichment index (EI) and structure index (SI) show particularly high sensitivity to soil nutrient enrichment levels and food web structural complexity, respectively, establishing them as core evaluation indicators for restoration assessment. Additionally, the channel index (CI) provides insights into organic matter decomposition pathways by quantifying the relative importance of bacterial versus fungal energy channels, while metabolic footprint of nematodes (NMF) quantifies the level of ecosystem functional recovery from the perspective of energy flow. These complementary indices together provide a comprehensive framework for evaluating both structural and functional aspects of ecosystem recovery. This review emphasizes that integrating nematode functional guild analysis and metabolic footprint assessments with traditional diversity indices enables more holistic evaluation of ecosystem structural and functional restoration processes. Future research directions should focus on: (1) integrating advanced molecular biological techniques with traditional morphological approaches to establish more comprehensive and accurate nematode identification systems; (2) developing multi-indicator analytical frameworks that clarify complex interactions among nematode communities, soil microbial populations, and physicochemical properties; and (3) identifying nematode indicator taxa exhibiting specific responses to different types of degraded ecosystems, thereby providing scientific foundations for evaluating ecological restoration effectiveness and implementing adaptive management strategies. This study provides scientific evidence for assessing restoration outcomes in degraded ecosystems and constructing robust biological indicator systems for long-term monitoring programs.