Abstract: Grassland vegetation growth monitoring is an important field of grassland monitoring, which macroscopically reveals growth status and dynamic changes of grassland, providing instantaneous and accurate references to scientific grassland management. At present, remote sensing is widely applied in growth monitoring, which means choosing NDVI as the index to reflect vegetation growth condition. This method includes periodical comparative, vegetation growth process curve and direct monitoring. Direct monitoring is more complex in using because it needs build relationships to plant physiology and ecology parameters; vegetation growth process curve and direct monitoring is simple, but they cannot classify the growth of vegetation; periodical comparative not only reflects the space of growth, it also reflects growth change in time series, facilitates contrast in many years. This paper summaries the methods and progress of grassland growth monitoring at home and abroad. The main remote sensing data includes AVHRR, MODIS, microwave data and ultrasonic data, and foreign growth monitoring focuses on the production forecast and against disaster warning. Domestic growth monitoring pays more attention to periodical comparative and phenophase monitoring and does few studies on real time monitoring. Then the paper points out the existing problems of growth monitoring, such as over-dependence on NDVI and applying the same monitoring method without consideration about the grass types. The prospects come in the end that by choosing the appropriate vegetation index, monitoring methods and monitoring growth in different zones and types to improve the precision of monitoring, as well as combining growth monitoring with grassland plant yield and grassland productivity will hopefully provide nomadic production with scientific guidance. Besides, this paper introduces three key fields in vegetation growth, which are vegetation growth hierarchies, determination of key vegetation growth period and main influencing factors of growth. Temperature and precipitation are the main factors driving the growth of vegetation, and the role of precipitation is the most important one.

Key words: grassland, growth, remote sensing monitoring, vegetation index