Under the dual coercion of global climate change and human activities, the study of the driving mechanism of vegetation cover in the ecologically fragile area of the eastern Loess Plateau is crucial for regional ecological recovery. In this paper, the Fen River Basin is taken as the research object, and we integrate the multi-source data of MODIS-NDVI from 2010 to 2024, and construct a nonlinear regression model to quantitatively analyze the longterm impacts of climate change and human activities on vegetation cover. The standardized spatio-temporal dataset was formed through geographic alignment, projection transformation and mask cropping, and the vegetation cover was estimated by the image element binary model, and the trend was analyzed by the Theil-Sen median method. The results showed that the vegetation cover in the Fen River basin showed a significant improvement trend from 2010 to 2024, with 74.31% of the area improved, the proportion of high cover increased from 25.30% to 37.98%, and the area of low cover decreased by 85.3%, with the recovery of the middle and lower reaches being particularly significant. The bias correlation coefficients of vegetation NDVI with precipitation and temperature were 0.672 and 0.473, respectively, with the upstream relying on precipitation with a bias correlation coefficient of 0.702 and the downstream being more strongly driven by temperature, with R=0.633. The contribution rates of climate change and human activities were quantified by the residual decomposition, and the positive contribution rate of climate change averaged 53.10%, with a high of 59.92% in the downstream, and that of human activities was 9.40%, but urbanization downstream led to a negative contribution of 8.63%. Among the key human activity factors, the average correlation coefficient of 0.568 for agricultural expansion and R=0.524 for afforestation significantly contributed to vegetation recovery, while urbanization R=-0.455 and industrial development R=-0.352 inhibited vegetation growth. It can be seen that climate warming and humidification is the dominant factor for vegetation improvement, but human activities can locally strengthen the restoration effect through ecological engineering and agricultural management, and downstream we need to be alert to the potential risk of urbanization squeezing ecological space.
