Objectives Vegetation plays an important role in ecological environment monitoring. Studying vegetation cover change can provide reference for regional ecological environment protection. The region of Altay in Xinjiang belongs to the ecological function zone of water conservation mountain grassland, with rich natural resources and beautiful scenery. However, the ecological environmental problems were gradually emerging under the national development strategies. Therefore, monitoring the dynamics of vegetation change in the area with multi-source remote sensing data is necessary to explore the relationship between the economic development and ecological environment protection.

Methods This paper uses multi-source remote sensing long time series data with breaks for additive seasonal and trend, topographical position and geostatistical analysis methods to monitor the vegetation cover dynamics in Altay of Xinjiang, China during 2000—2019.

Results This paper processed large number of multisource remote sensing data along with human activity data and showed that during the study period, the number of vegetation breakpoints increased year by year from 2003 to 2009, and then gradually decreased after 2009. Meanwhile, seven types of vegetation breakpoint trends were detected, among them, the more number of breakpoints from degradation to growth type was identified, and the types of disturbance degradation and continuous degradation were less. From the interannual change curve, the dynamic change of vegetation coverage showed a trend of first decreasing and then increasing, that is, the vegetation coverage showed a degradation trend from 2000 to 2008 and a significant improvement trend from 2008 to 2019, and the degradation was greater than the improvement. Meanwhile, the east slope with an elevation of more than 900 m and a slope of more than 15° (from north to east and from south to east) is the dominant topographic location of vegetation degradation type, accounting for 62.4%.

Conclusions The protection of ecological environment in Altay of Xinjiang still needs to be further strengthened and effective protection measures should be taken.