Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica) forests in the Aurès massif of eastern Algeria have been declining for decades, but the relative weight of climatic and non-climatic drivers remains debated. We reconstructed land-cover and vegetation–drought dynamics for Belezma National Park over 1985–2025 using Landsat surface reflectance processed in Google Earth Engine, Random Forest classification of five land-cover classes at decadal steps, per-pixel Theil–Sen and Mann–Kendall trend analysis of spectral indices, and TerraClimate-derived SPEI. Classification accuracy was high (overall accuracy 0.971–0.998; kappa 0.962–0.997). The cedar class contracted from 1561 to 720 ha (−53.9%), while mixed forest expanded by 93.4%. Park-mean NDVI rose significantly even as growing-season SPEI and PDSI declined, and annual NDVI was uncorrelated with SPEI (r = 0.09, p = 0.58), indicating that aggregate greening masks a localised, drought- and disturbance-associated loss of cedar.