In recent years,the rodent damage has been increasing on our country′s grassland year by year. Grassland rodent damage not only aggravates the process of soil erosion and dese rtification,but also causes plague.The number of rat holes is an important index for rodent damage m onitoring and grade evaluation in our country.Now the manual survey method has many problem s,such as low precision,time-consuming and labor-consuming,high investigation cost,only s uitable for small area investigation,and so on.It is difficult to meet the requirements of large area real-time monitoring and research.Dynamic and real-time monitoring of the number of rat holes is an imp ortant means to effectively formulate anti-rodent measures and prevent the occurrence of plague .In this study,the data of desertified grassland was collected by high spectrometer carried by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV),and the rat hole index (RHI) was proposed to identify the rat hole in the grassland.The results show that the ov erall accuracy of identifying prairie rat holes by RHI index can reach 97% and the Kappa coefficie nt can reach 0.93. Compared with normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI),soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI) and ratio vegetation index (RVI) vegetation index models,this model has higher recognition accuracy.The proposal of RHI can effectively improve the accuracy and eff iciency of rat hole identification in grassland,and provide an effective method for rodent control and grassland degradation monitoring and research.