The invention discloses a riparian zone vegetation coverage extraction method based on mountain river classification, and the method comprises the steps: obtaining the gradient, slope direction, change rate and elevation of each point of a mountain river required by a model, and extracting the features of a water system; grading the rivers in the required mountainous area; cutting the preprocessedremote sensing data image by adopting a boundary corresponding to the drainage basin area to obtain a remote sensing data image of the whole required mountainous area river drainage basin; obtainingthe vegetation coverage of each river reach, and calculating the vegetation coverage of the riparian zone of the required mountainous river; and estimating the vegetation coverage change trend according to the watershed vegetation coverage multi-year change rate. The method can conveniently and quickly obtain the vegetation coverage of the riparian zone of the mountainous river, avoids consuming too much manpower and material resources, improves the precision, can reflect the ecological environment of different river sections of the mountainous river, belongs to an important part of ecologicalriver evaluation, and is very high in practicality and wide in applicability.