Forest cover will be changed by natural disaster, deforest and other activities. Remote sensing has the ability to monitor the change of forest cover in large area. However, in order to obtain the change information of forest cover, the method for getting the change information from remote sensing images is needed. China has launched GF-1 satellite in 2013, the 16m spatial resolution multi-spectral data of it should be suitable for foest cover detection applications. In this paper, I describe a set of procedures that automate forest cover change detection using a pair of GF-1 images. The proposed method was tailored to work with high spatial resolution images acquired over forest in large area. To achieve a high level of automation, automatic optimum threshold selection algorithm were applied in the processing steps. In this study, an overall change recognition accuracy of 83% has been achieved.