The changing characteristics and tendency of runoff and sediment transport in the Poyang Lake seriously affected the sustainable development in the Lake Poyang area and the middle reach of the Yangtze River. This paper statistically analyses the runoff and sediment transport of 3 major stations in the Lake Poyang catchment. Compared with the annual runoff and sediment transport before 1990, there were some obviously changes of annual sediment transport in the term of 1990-2001. Through several non-parameter statistical methods such as the moving average, the Spearman order correlativity and the linear regression analysis, the paper concludes that during the last five decades (1955-2001), an increase of runoff at Hukou Station was noted while no obvious sediment transportation decrease was observed ;as to the Waizhou Station, the sediment transportation was decreased;in Meigang Station, the increase of runoff was small whereas the sediment transportation changed little. The rainfall variation, wa-ter-soil erosion measures, reservoir built and the evolution of land use etc. could the major factors that lead to such change. That the human activity have played a more important role, especially in the past decades.