Due to loose soil property and sparse vegetation coverage, the Loess Plateau is a famous soil erosion region in China or even the world. Although widespread ecological restoration efforts have been devoted in past decades, little progress could be seen in the loess region as a result of its unique natural environments. The ecological environment has not been significantly restored until 1999 with the introduction of the Grain for Green Project. As the largest program in history to restore ecological environment, this project has attracted the participation of huge number of farmers. Furthermore, it has involved the most extensive area and the largest amount of domestic investment and as a result, the degraded ecological environment has been gradually restored. With the implementation of the project, it is expected the land use/landscape has been changed accordingly. Prior studies have widely investigated the spatial-temporal dynamics and their driving forces of landscape patterns in medium-to-large watersheds by analyzing Landsat TM remote sensing data. In contrast, studies on landscape patterns in small watersheds through high-resolution remote sensing images are lacking, in particular on the land use dynamics resulted from various ecological restoration projects. Up to now, the Grain for Green projects has been implemented for more than 10 years, and it is now in the benefit consolidation phase. Therefore, an urgent need at present is to quantitatively evaluate the impacts of the ecological restoration project on land use change and landscape patterns through remote sensing and GIS techniques, with which to provide guidelines for future policies and decision making. Based on the Luoyugou watershed in Tianshui (Gansu Province), this study evaluated the dynamic changes of land use and landscape patterns between 2002 and 2008 by analyzing Spot5 remote sensing images. The results show that its land use and landscape patterns have been substantially changed due to the implementation of the Grain for Green project, with a total change of 36.77%. Major changed land use categories were cropland, orchards, young forest plantation, and forestland. In particular, 28.95% of the cropland had been converted to other land use patterns during the study period, of which, 48.83% had been converted to orchards and 44.69% to young forest plantation. The changes of landscape patterns showed an obvious spatial distribution, with most of the gentle slope regions being converted to orchards and the medium-to-high altitudes mainly to young forest plantation regions. After the implementation of the Grain for Green project, the ecological landscape in the Luoyugou watershed has been greatly improved, indicating a good sign for future development.