Abstract: As China' s economy enters the new normal, the economic growth mechanism of traditional forestry industry has little effect. If forestry industry wants to achieve high-quality development, which increases the gross output value of forestry industry and promotes the optimization and upgrading of forestry industrial structure, it must rely on the human capital. Based on the forestry panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2000-2018, it empirically tested the impact of human capital on the development quality of forestry industry, and explored the mediating role of technological progress and the moderating role of physical capital input. The results show that human capital significantly positively affects the development quality of forestry industry. Among them, compared with the coefficient of human capital on the total output value of forestry industry, its influence on the upgrading of forestry industrial structure is slightly weaker, indicating that in the rationalization and upgrading of forestry industrial structure, compared with the huge number of forestry labor force, the real high level of human capital is insufficient. Technological progress has a significant intermediary effect between human capital and the development quality of forestry industry. It shows that forestry talents can absorb and imitate advanced production technology, promote the replacement of modern production factors to traditional production factors, improve the production efficiency of forestry, and realize the high-quality development of forestry industry by virtue of their own endowment ability and knowledge level. Insufficient investment of physical capital weakens the influence of human capital on the development quality of forestry industry. It indicates that the development of the forestry industry needs a lot of financial support, and not only relying on government investment which can not effectively support the transformation of the forestry industry, but also need to introduce private capital. Based on this, it is suggested to enhance the construction of forestry talents, to improve their treatment, and take the road of promoting forestry through science and education and strengthening forestry with talents, to actively absorb the management experience and advanced technology of developed countries and enhance the content of forestry science and technology, to introduce private capital investment and inject capital and vitality into the development of forestry industry.