The vegetation influences the exchange of energy, mass and momentum between the land surface and atmosphere. With the increase of our understanding and the development of remote sensing, the description of land surface vegetation status is changing in the three generations of land surface parameterizations (LSPs). In the second generation of LSPs, the values of the vegetation parameters are obtained from the land cover maps that are the qualitative descriptions about the land surface. In some third generation of LSPs, some important vegetation parameters are retrieved directly from the satellite data, and this provides a more quantitative description of the vegetation status. Vegetation Continuous Field (VCF) is a quantitative description about the vegetation, which can be viewed as an alternative to the traditional classification approach for using remote sensing data to characterize global land cover. This paper reviews how the descriptions varies from a qualitative one to the more quantitive ones, and introduces the application of satellite remote sensing to retrieving these vegetation variations.