Vegetation is the hub of the process of connecting the earth's key zones, and it is an important factor for ecological improvement in arid regions. In the context of increasing global drought, human activities have exacerbated the occurrence of droughts. What are the differences in the response and recovery characteristics of different vegetation to drought? Does vegetation have enough ecological resilience to cope with future drought? Discussing and analyzing these questions will help to improve the prediction capacity of terrestrial ecosystem response in arid regions under climate change, and optimize the water resource carrying capacity of arid regions under changing environments. However, the existing research mainly focuses on the sensitivity of vegetation to drought, evaluating one aspect of vegetation resistance or recovery, and lacking a comprehensive quantitative evaluation method of vegetation ecological resilience. This paper attempts to improve the quantitative method of vegetation resistance and resilience to drought by using the gross primary productivity of vegetation, and then synthesizes the two indicators of vegetation resistance and resilience to construct an evaluation method of vegetation ecological resilience under drought stress, and uses the quantitative results of ecological resilience to identify vegetation ecological vulnerable areas. Taking the Yellow River Basin as an example, the evaluation results showed that the overall vegetation ecological resilience of the Yellow River Basin under drought stress showed a downward trend from 1982 to 2018, indicating that the ecological vulnerability of the Yellow River Basin has increased. Spatially, the distribution of low resilience in arid and semi-arid areas in the north and high resilience in river source and downstream areas is presented. The ecological resilience of forestland vegetation is highest, the ecological resilience of grassland vegetation is lowest, and the ecological resilience of cultivated land vegetation is between forestland and grassland.