In order to evaluate the performance of monitoring land cover change in mining areas by BJ-1 small satellite remote sensing data, the authors made an experimental and comparative study of several change detection methods, with the east coal mining district of Xuzhou City in Jiangsu Province as the study area. Direct change detection methods based on image information operation and image information transformation as well as the post-classification comparison method were adopted in the experiment. The results show that the change vector analysis can attain the highest accuracy, followed by the method of image ratio method, image differencing and multi-band principal component analysis. Through the change detection process, several areas with great land cover change were detected, such as Qingshanquan, Hanqiao and Dongzhuang mining areas in northern east mining district and Dahuangshan mining area in southern east mining district.