The variation of vegetation indicates the changes of global and regional environment.In this paper, spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation on Hainan Island were explored by using MODIS NDVI data from 2001 to 2014 based on Theil-Sen median method and standard deviation.Then,the future vegetation change tendency was analyzed based on Hurst exponent.Specially,the influence of climate change and human activities were assessed based on temperature,precipitation,and urbanization rate.The results showed that: (1)the annual NDVI values showed a significant increasing trend at an annual rate of 0.02 per year over the study period;(2)the vegetation standard deviation showed obvious characteristics:high at the boundary and low in the middle,and the high variation was apparent across 42%of the land,mainly distributed around the coastal areas of Haikou,Qionghai,Wanning,Dongfang,Ledong;(3)as a whole,the NDVI values of Hainan Island showed an upward trend of improvement,specifically,areas where improvement levels were light and moderate accounted for 53.42% of all area during 20012014,significantly improved with 22.65% of the region's vegetation;(4)the percentage of anti-persistence was 57.21%,and 42.71%for persistence.The four change characteristics of future vegetation were degradation into improvement,continual degradation, improvement into degradation,and continual improvement,and the percentages were 40.9%,34.1%,13.94%, and 11.15%,respectively;(5)the vegetation variation was influenced by precipitation even more than temperature; moreover,in EL Nino years,34.48% of NDVI pixels showed positive anomaly,while 65.52% showed negative anomaly,conversely,63.01% of NDVI pixels showed positive anomaly,while 36.99% showed negative anomaly for La Nina years;(6)the vegetation presented a upward trend based on the increase of afforested area,while urbanization can induce negative effect on vegetation growth.