Long term development of mineral resources will have a huge impact on the quality of regional ecological environment Comprehensive and accurate monitoring and evaluation of the ecological environment quality in mining areas is of great significance for ensuring regional sustainable development Based on Landsat images from 2001 to 2020 this study constructed an improved remote sensing ecological index ND-RSEI to analyze the spatiotemporal variation pattern of ecological environment quality in Fengfeng mining area and explored the factors affecting the spatiotemporal variation of ND-RSEI The results indicate that 1 ND-RSEI has a strong ability to distinguish urban areas gangue hills and industrial squares and is suitable for evaluating the ecological environment quality of mining cities 2 From 2001 to 2020 the overall ecological environment quality in the research area was at a good level with poor areas mainly dis tributed in urban areas and factory clusters The excellent areas were mainly high vegetation covered areas with flat terrain The proportion of areas with improved ecological environment quality was 32 1% and the proportion of areas with deteriorated ecological environment quality was 25 2% The overall ecological environment quality has improved to some extent The exploitation of resources has led to the deterioration of the ecological environment with 8 out of 11 mining areas showing a degradation trend and 3 mining areas showing an improvement trend being discontinued mining areas 3 The combination of land use type and other factors with land use type is the main factor explaining the spatial heterogeneity of ND-RSEI among which the influence of human factors on ecological environment quality is gradually increasing