Abstract: In this paper, the natural forest protection project area of Aksu prefecture is taken as the research area.Based on MODIS satellite image data, the fractional vegetation cover (FVC) of growing seasonis produced based on pixel dichotomy from 2000—2020. Subsequently, the temporal variation and spatial distribution characteristics of long time series FVC are analyzed. Finally, the driving mechanism of vegetation coverage change is analyzed using the geographic detector model. The results show that the vegetation coverage in the research area increased significantly by 0.23%/a from 2000 to 2020. The area with significant increase in vegetation coverage accounted for 50.4%. Among the many factors, land use is the main factor affecting the vegetation cover in the study area, and the explanatory power reached 0.59. The explanatory power of population density, evapotranspiration and GDP on FVC is the secondary influencing factors, which are 0.360, 0.357 and 0.308, respectively. These results help to better understand the impact of human activities and natural factors on vegetation ecological quality cover changes and their interacting mechanisms.

Key words: vegetation coverage, remote sensing, Aksu prefecture, natural forest protection project, geographic detector model