Abstract: Field measurement and remote sensing measurement are rudimental approaches to get vegetation coverage. To analyze its characteristics and scope of application, we can reach the following conclusions:due to the restriction of many factors such as manpower and material resources, field measurement is unfit popularized as a single method in a wide measurement range, but it can offer remote sensing monitoring accuracy evaluation and validation essential data. Regression model method has relatively high precision in a small scale but with a strong dependence of the measured data. Vegetation index method and image element decomposition method are widely used at present for they are not subject to measured data. But in practice, we should accord to the surface condition to combine with other methods to increase the vegetation coverage extraction accuracy.