Atmospheric detection lidar is a powerful tool with fine temporal-spatial resolution, high detection accuracy and real-time profiling data acquisition. Lidar network and spaceborne lidar technology, can obtain large-spatial-scale and continuous four-dimensional atmospheric data for researching on environment, meteorology and climate. The lidar network and the spaceborne lidar program are introduced in detail. The main lidar networks include the network detection of atmospheric composition change(NDACC), the European aerosol research lidar network(EARLINET), the Asian dust and aerosol research network(AD-NET), the regional east atmospheric lidar mesonet(REALM), micro-pulse lidar network(MPLNET), and the atmosphere aerosol and ozone monitoring in CIS regions(CIS-LINET). The functions, the lidar types organization and lidar sites, daily observation activities and standardization are described respectively for every lidar network. Lidar in space technology experiment(LITE) has opened a new era for spaceborne lidar. Following that, several spaceborne lidar programs are proposed by the NASA, ESA and JAXA. The scientific goal, lidar type, lidar related parameters and the technical principles of these spaceborne lidar are introduced respectively. In China, a multifunction spaceborne lidar is also proposed to monitor aerosol, cloud and CO2. In summary, the advantages and the applications of the lidar networking observation and the spaceborne lidar are illustrated.