Abstract: Urban-rural ecotone is a transitional zone between urban and rural areas with frequent changes in land types and the prominent contradiction between human and land. Taking the urban-rural ecotone of Beijing as the research object, we developed a new index of tree canopy and analyzed the changes of tree canopy in rural residential areas in 2002 and 2013 based on the true color aerial photographs of August-September 2002 and WordView-2 satellite images of August-September 2013 with the resolution of 0.5 m in order to provide some useful theoretical and practical guidances for the ecological environment construction of rural residential areas under the background of the current rural revitalization. The results show that the overall tree canopy in the urban-rural ecotone increased from 19.54% to 22.15% from 2002 to 2013, the number of rural residential areas decreased by 428, and the average tree canopy in residential areas increased from 17.78% to 25.01%. From the tree canopy level, the proportion of rural residential areas with high coverage and very high coverage in 2013 increased by 14.27 percentage points and 6.45 percentage points respectively compared with that of 2002. The proportion of rural residential areas with very low coverage decreased by 0.13 percentage points during this period. In terms of spatial distribution, for both 2002 and 2013, the tree canopy in rural residential areas showed an increasing trend with the increase of ring roads. Over the 11 years, the tree canopy in old residential areas reduced from 19.03% to 16.39%. The probability matrix analysis of land transfer showes that the construction land is the most stable and the probability of keeping itself unchanged is 84.50%. The tree canopy in the newly emerging rural residential areas (25.70%) is significantly higher than that in the disappeared rural residential areas (15.54%). Statistical analysis on the changes of rural residential areas in different change modes show that the tree canopy rates of the expanded, newly increased and marginally increased rural residential areas were 25.05%, 25.70% and 27.71%, respectively.