Abstract: It is of great significance to get timely environmental elements evolution information promptly in order to understand and control the influence of local industrialization and urbanization to regional environment. The spatio-temporal evolution of the vegetation cover, land surface water distribution, and the relation between environment elements and regional industrialization and urbanization were analyzed based on the selected six scenes of Landsat and MSS data of Karamay City, Xinjiang, China and its surrounding regions from 1977 to 2016. The extraction of vegetation cover and land surface water distribution were performed by the threshold setting based on NDVI and WI. Using method of linear regression and surface water recurrence, the vegetation cover variation tendency in different time period were calculated to characterize the environment dynamics and its relation with human activities during the industrialization, combined with continuous meteorological data and traffic lines extracted from images from 1977 to 2011. The results showed that the vegetation cover presents a signifi-cant and long-lasting increasing trend over the 40 years by an area of 1 049.1 km² in this region yet there was a degradation area which existed in the industrial zone with an area of 60.1 km². The vegetation coverage improvement trend exhibited a two-stage feature in the industrial zone with one stage having slight decrease and the other, continuous increase. But it displayed a three-stage feature at a large scale(of the whole city) as a slow increase, to fast increase and to a stable status. The distribution of actual surface water recurrence rate exhibited a slow increasing of permanent water body around inhabitation area and a seasonal fluctuation of free water body in the wetlands. Given the changes in the traffic network coverage in the study area, the improvement trend of environment elements showed the correlation with the distribution of inhabitation area where the production activities of oil industry took place. This study demonstrated that industrial production behavior in Karamay oil field promoted the regional environment improvement in the surrounding areas. The remote sensing technology can be of great help in monitoring the influence of local industrialization on regional environmental elements.

Key words: environmental elements, spatio-temporal evolution, industrialization, remote sensing monitoring