Abstract: 【Objective】 Through long-term remote sensing monitoring method, we studied the vegetation cover change and its driving factors at the county level in the southeastern part of China, where rainfall is abundant and soil is eroded easily. 【Method】 Taking Changting County of Fujian as the research area, with the help of Google Earth image of high resolution(1-1.5 m)from 2013 to 2015 and the result of field investigation in July 2015 for classified blueprint and prior knowledge, the land use type is divided into five major categories including forest, shrub, farmland, residential land and bare land by using eight phase Landsat MSS/TM data from 1976 to 2014 and expert classification system. Through the combination of the confusion matrix and the statistical data, the accuracy of the classification results is tested, and the driving factors of the vegetation cover change are analyzed based on the classification results. 【Result】 The classification system of expert classification system has higher classification precision of land use type(more than 85%); the vegetation coverage in the study area has been higher in the last 40 years(81.5%-88.3%); the forest area continues to increase; although the area of farmland is fluctuating, the total area remains stable; the area of shrubs is reduced in general. In the middle of the study area, there were a large number of bare soil areas in 1980s. After 1985, it continued to decrease, and became stable after 2010; the area of the residential area experienced a rapid growth stage after 1995 and stabilized after 2010; the total area of cultivated land was less, mainly in the vicinity of the residential area. 【Conclusion】 The vegetation cover in Changting County has experienced more complicated spatiotemporal changes in the past 40 years, and the driving factors are different at different stages. Vegetation cover area experienced a process of decreasing first and then increasing, and the total area increased. During the whole process of change, the main driving factors for the increase of vegetation cover area are afforestation and soil erosion control, the afforestation process makes the forest area increase, the soil erosion control project makes the bare soil area decrease; the driving factor of the vegetation cover area reduction is urbanization, and urbanization leads to the expansion of residential area and the reduction of shrub area.