Solar energy is considered one of the key solutions to the growing demand for energy and to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Thanks to the relatively low cost of land use for solar energy and high power gener. ••China's deserts experienced rapid expansion of PV power s. Zilong Xia: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Visualization. Yingjie Li: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. Wei Zhang: Methodology, Wr. Deserts account for 17% of the world's land area, mainly distributed in Asia and Africa (Cherlet et al., 2018; Durant et al., 2012). With the desertification caused by climate change and popu. China has vast desert areas, mainly located in the northern arid and semi-arid regions (SFA, 2011). In these areas, where ecosystems are very fragile, PV power stations are boo. In order to analyze the vegetation changes before and after PV power stations deployment, it is important to determine the deployment time and extract vegetation information of P.