Artemisia ordosica community coverage is a direct index to estimate the desertification severity in Mu Us Sandland.Acquiring its information is beneficial to carry out desertification monitoring and evaluation better.In this paper

we utilize spectral mixture analysis to retrieve Artemisia ordosica coverage information

based on Landsat ETM+ image.Some key issues in SMA process

including image pre-processing

endmember selection

spectral mixture model selection and SMA results analysis

are discussed in depth

and the suitable solutions are provided.Then the coverage of Artemisia ordosica community is retrieved

and the accuracy of the result is validated based on field survey data.The results show A significant linear relationship is found between Artemisia ordosica community fraction and measured Artemisia ordosica community coverage（the correlation coefficient is 0.88）.So

Artemisia ordosica community coverage of the research region can be acquired though linear transformation of Artemisia ordosica community fraction.Therefore

SMA is an effective technology for retrieving Artemisia ordosica community coverage accurately in Mu Us Sandland.