Ecological capital is one of the base of social and economic development. Understanding the ecological capital in a region is very useful to take effective management to improve the sustainable development. Thus, it is very important to assess of the ecological capital in a region. In this study, the ecological capital of the 18 counties in Daxiaoxinganling in 2004 and 2011 were evaluated. The main objectives of this study were to investigate (1) the spatial and temporal variation in ecological capital, (2) the changes in the ratio of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and ecological capital in Daxiaoxinganling. The results showed that the ecological capital of the Daxiaoxinganling is unevenly distributed. The high ecological capitals were mainly found in the center region, while the relatively low values were occurred in north and south regions. Such pattern of the ecological capital distribution may be explained by two reasons. One is the land use. The high ecological capitals were occurred in center regions, which is due to the fact that there are large number areas of wetland in there. This is because that the service value of the wetland is with the highest value, for example it's is 65 times higher than forest. The other reason is the net primary productivity (NPP) of the vegetations is different in different regions. NPP is impacted by many factors such as soil type, climate (solar radiation, precipitation, temperature) and human disturbance, etc. In the center regions, which have the optimal environmental factor for the vegetation growth, thus the NNP is high. The total ecological capital was reduced from 2379.26×10⁸ Yuan in 2004 to 2308.53×10⁸ Yuan in 2011, with a decrease of 2.97%. This indicates that there were no significant changes in the total ecological capital. However, there were profound variations in ecological capital in different counties, with the range from -29.54% to 26.38%. In this study, the variation of ecological capital was classified into seven levels including sharp decline (<-50%), moderate decline (-50%—-15%), light decline (-15%—-5%), approximately stable (-5%-5%), light increase (5%-15%), moderate increase (15%-50%) and sharp increase (>50%). Bayan County, Donghe County and Heihe City were in the moderate decline for their decline exceeding 15%. Luobei County, Nenjiang County and Suiling County were in the light decline. Beian City and Wudalianchi City were in the moderate increase, while Yichun City, Tieli City and Tangyuan County were in the light increase. The remaining counties were in the approximately stable. The variation of the ecological capital changes can be attributed to the changing in land use as consequence of urbanization. In the present study, the ratios between GDP and ecological capital were gradually increasing in all the counties. It is due to the development of the economy. In order to increase the ecological capital and then improve the sustainable development, the natural resource should be used in different ways in the different economic level regions of Daxiaoxinganling.