Agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China is a transitional and interlaced zone of agricultural cultivation region and grazing region. The ecotone is a complex containing several ecosystems. Soil desertification has become a serious problem that endangered sustainable development in the ecotone. The area of desertification land has been increasing year after year in agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China. This problem concerns the ecological environment, economic development and living quality of people in northern and central eastern of China. For these reasons, ecotone has recently become a focus of research of restoration ecology and global climate change. Remote sensing monitoring of desertification land is a key technique to collect the status and development of sandy land, providing scientific bases for the national desertification control. Landsat ETM+ is an advanced multi-spectral remote sensing system for the research of regional scale and has been widely used in many fields, such as geologic surveys, mapping, vegetation monitoring, etc. In the present, the authors introduce that spectral characteristics, desertification information extraction, desertification classification and development analyses in detail, and summarizes the study progresses discusses the problems and trends.