Abstract: The upgrading of industrial structure is the premise to achieve industrial optimization. Measuring the direction and speed of forestry industrial structure upgrading and analyzing the mechanism of its optimization can provide a basis for the formulation of forestry industrial policies. Based on the data of forestry industry in 30 provinces from 2000 to 2015, and applying the industrial structure overstepping coefficient, the Moore value, and the panel quantile regression methods, this paper calculated the upgrading direction and speed of forestry industrial structure respectively, and analyzed its main influencing factors. Results show that: currently, the average overstepping coefficient of the industrial structure of the second forestry industry was 3.98, which was obviously higher than that of the first industry (-1.64) and that of the third industry (1.52). The numerical leading value of industrial structure of the third industry was higher than that of the first industry in 70% of the provinces, which highlights the trend of upgrading the forestry industry from low value-added to high value-added industries. Results of the Moore value, α value and K value indicated that most provinces with fast upgrading of forestry industry structure were eastern coastal provinces. The overall feature was that the trend of China’s forestry industrial structure upgrading to the second and third industries was obvious, and the speed of upgrading was also increasing. In addition, the panel quantile regression results show that the per capita GDP, forest coverage rate, population size, R&D internal expenditure and the number of forest stations are the main influencing factors of the upgrading of forestry industry structure. Therefore, to well promote the upgrading of forestry industry, this paper suggests: to encourage the central and western provinces to undertake the second forestry industry of eastern coastal provinces, to vigorously develop the third forestry industry of the of eastern coastal provinces, to increase the infrastructure construction for rich forest resource areas, to improve science and technology investment of forestry three industries, and to improve the reform of forest tenure and related forestry industry policy.