Aquatic vegetation is the core of the wetland ecosystem, and it’s also the main factor influencing the wetland ecosystem functions. In recent years, satellite remote sensing technology has been widely used in the investigation, classification and protection fields of wetland vegetation resources. Because of its unique growth environment, aquatic vegetation, the canopy spectrum of aquatic vegetation will be affected by water background elements including air-water interface, plankton in the water, sediment content, transparency, water depth, sediment, and the other optically active ingredients. When the remote sensing technology for wetland aquatic vegetation canopy spectral studies, should be considered the growth environment differences between aquatic and terrestrial vegetation. However, previous studies did not get the attention it deserves. This paper choose a typical water plant (Iris tentorium Maxim) as the research object, simulate the growth environment of wetland aquatic plants, use the feature spectrometer measurements the spectral reflectance of Iris tentorium Maxim vegetation canopy under different water depth gradient background (400~2 400 nm). Experimental results show that there is a significant negative correlation between background water depth and Iris canopy reflectance. Visible light band absolute correlation coefficient is above 0.9, near infrared band absolute correlation coefficient is above 0.8. In visible light and near infrared band, with water depth increases, the Iris canopy reflectance decreases obviously. Finally based on the highest correlation band of visible light and near infrared region (505, 717, 1 075 and 2 383 nm) established the linear equation between background water depth and the canopy reflectance, obtained the related parameters.