Taking the SCI and SSCI papers in the Web of Science （WoS） and the journal papers in the CNKI as the data source， we used bibliometrics and the literature analysis software CiteSpace to explore the development and hot spots of urban ecological remote sensing in the past three decades and drew the knowledge map of the field from 1991 to 2021. The results show that： （1） in terms of the number of publications， the research on urban ecological remote sensing has gone through three development stages， i.e.， budding stage， accumulation stage， and rapid growth stage； globally， the center of centroid of the number of published papers shows a trend of migration from the east to the west and then back to the east； （2） in the light of research institutions， Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research， Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University have published most papers in this field in WoS and CNKI； （3） in terms of journals， Remote Sensing and Acta Ecologica Sinica have published most papers in this field in WoS and CNKI， respectively； （4） in terms of core authors， Weiqi Zhou in Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hanqiu Xu in Fuzhou University （China） published the most papers in WoS and CNKI， respectively； and （5） statistics of keywords shows that the keywords of ecological environment， land use， and landscape pattern were the hot spots of urban ecological remote sensing research in recent years. In general， urban ecological remote sensing was playing an increasingly important role in the disciplines of environmental science， physical geography， and geomatics. The application of remote sensing ecological models to quantitatively assess ecological environment quality has become an important trend in this field. Also， urban ecological remote sensing research requires higher and higher spatial resolution of remote sensing images. Collaborative inversion of urban ecological quality with various remote sensing images will also be a development trend in this field.