Abstract: At the beginning of the 21st century, China launched a number of key ecological restoration projects (KERPs) unprecedentedly. Minqin is a typical degrading oasis, and its success and lessons of KERPs are helpful to global dryland land degradation control. This article obtained multi-seasonal Landsat data in 2010 and 2015, and conducted a spectral mixture analysis on each-season remote sensing data. Based on the spectral mixture analysis results, we implemented land cover/use classification in 2010 and 2015. The combination of post-classification comparison and endmember abundance difference in invariant land was then adopted to analyze ecological restoration status in Minqin during the initial period of the second ecological restoration stage (2010-2015). The results show that the land degradation area is 39 712.14 hm², and the area of restoration is 101 503.44 hm². The area of land restoration is larger than that of degradation, which indicates Minqin reached the zero net land degradation goal from 2010 to 2015, and was in a relative recovery situation. Accordingly, sand land area and sandification degree in invariant sand land decreased. Although the area of salinized land has increased, the salinization degree of invariant region decreased. Forest and grass land compared to cropland, and summer crop compared to spring crop are preponderant vegetation cover types. Water area is somewhat reduced, but the water content in invariant region increased. This research shows that Minqin has already enter into virtuous restoration phase after nearly 20-year ecological restoration governance.

Key words: Minqin, land degradation, ecological restoration projects, dynamic monitoring, spectral mixture analysis