With the increasing prominence of population,resources and environment,land use / land cover change (LUCC) has become the frontier and hot topic of global change research. Land cover in China is also a reseach field a lot of scholars to pursue,but due to its interdisciplinary and comprehensive characteristic,research results is rich and complicated,it is necessary to sort out the system. Through the study of land cover,from the aspects of the data,driving mechanism,evolution mechanism,effect analysis,the research points out that the trend of the future study is a comprehensive study of multidimensional unified standard system,strengthen the research of data processing and database specification model,focuses on the relationship and coordination effect research and application are the focus of future research.