As the economy develops, the tourism ecological environment (TEE) has been gradually damaged. The ecological environment is the basis of human life, and the sustainable development of the ecological environment is of great importance to promote the stable development of society. China has rich grassland tourism resources. However, as a result of the rapid development of tourism, some scenic spots have been overdeveloped and commercialised, leading to the destruction of natural landscapes, damage to ecosystems and the gradual sanding of large tracts of grassland. The desert grassland used for tourism development is located between the grassland and the desert, and is the barrier that ensures the entire grassland ecosystem. To carry out environmental management of tourism ecology, it is necessary to construct a statistical monitoring index system for tourism ecology. However, traditional ecological environment monitoring is mainly based on manual sampling survey, which is cumbersome. The monitoring data is not accurate enough. In this paper, remote sensing technology (RST) was used to obtain remote sensing images of desert grassland, and intelligent image processing (IIP) technology was used for feature recognition. Compared with the traditional ecological environment statistical monitoring method, it showed that: In desert grassland A, the average monitoring accuracy of the traditional ecological environment statistical monitoring method and the ecological environment statistical monitoring method based on IIP were 90.12% and 94.56% respectively; in desert grassland B, the average monitoring accuracy of the traditional ecological environment statistical monitoring method and the ecological environment statistical monitoring method based on IIP were 88.20% and 92.60% respectively. Therefore, statistical monitoring of TEE based on IIP can improve the monitoring accuracy of ecological environment indicators.