The Nanjing Forestry University, called "Nanlin", is located in Nanjing, Jiangsu. It is a provincial key university built by the State Forestry Bureau and the people's Government of Jiangsu province. It is selected as the first batch of national first "training program for outstanding agricultural and forestry talents", "special key subject project", "2011 cooperative innovation center" in Jiangsu Province, and "outstanding workers in Jiangsu province". The program of educating and training of the fifteen key construction universities in Jiangsu province has become one of the characteristics of the forestry department, which has the advantages of resources, ecology and environment, and has a multidisciplinary university of science, industry, agriculture, culture, management, philosophy, law, art and other disciplines. Forest Science, forestry engineering, landscape architecture and other three disciplines ranked the top five in the third round of discipline assessment of the Ministry of education.

The predecessor of the school is the forest Department of Centre College (founded in 1902) and the forest Department of Jinling University (founded in 1910). The Nanjing Forestry College, which was formed in 1952, is one of the only three higher forestry colleges and universities in the country at that time. In 1955, the Department of forestry of China middle Agricultural College (Wuhan University, Nanchang University and the Forestry Department of Hubei Agricultural Institute) was incorporated into the Department of forestry. In 1972, it was renamed as Nanjing Forestry Industry Institute. In 1983, the name of Nanjing Forestry College was restored, and Nanjing Forestry University was renamed in 1985.

As of December 2015, the school covers an area of 10295 mu, the total value of teaching and scientific research instruments and equipment is 328 million yuan, the total amount of paper documents in the library is 1 million 500 thousand, with 22 Colleges (Department), 72 undergraduate majors, 8 postdoctoral stations, 7 first degree PhD authorizing points and 22 first degree master's degree authorization points. There are 6 national specialty construction points, 16 provincial brand specialties, more than 1200 full-time teachers and more than 3 full time students, including doctoral and master graduate students and more than 4500 foreign students.