Remote sensing technology has been rapidly developed in recent decades, and has been widely used in ecology and environment field. MODIS is a new data source, and in its many products, land cover product is an important product, and it has often been used in global and regional models. In the present review, the procedure of producing land cover product is clearly discussed, and the feature of the classification based network or decision tree is introduced. The paper emphasized the importance of direction information in classification, detailed introduction of change vector analysis methods and land cover change detection based artificial nerve network, analyzed global 17 land cover types defined by IGBP, and compared with other 3 classification systems.