Monitoring land cover change and understanding the dynamic of land cover is increasingly important in sustainable development and management of natural ecosystems. Most land use changes occur without a clear and logical planning with little attention to their environmental impact. This research was done in order to study land cover changes in protected area of Kabir Kouh in recent decades using Landsat satellite images between 2001 and 2020. Images were classified through supervised classification using maximum likelihood technique. Also land cover/use change map from satellite images were obtained. In order to accuracy assessment of this method, after collecting ground truth data which were carried out through field visiting, Google earth images and aerial photographs, overall accuracy and Kappa Coefficient was used. According to obtained results, overall accuracy of resulted maps through classification using maximum likelihood classifier method for TM and OLI images was 93% and 94%, respectively, that states high accuracy of this algorithm in classification of satellites images. The results indicate that during the 13 years, agriculture and rangeland land have been increased by 1.14% (2.04 km2) and 1.91% (3.42 km2), respectively, while forest area has decreased by 3.04% (5.46 km2). Thus, the present study displays that remote sensing and GIS are important technologies for temporal analysis and quantification of spatial phenomena is made possible by these technologies in less time, at low cost and with better accuracy.