Abstract For monitoring hydraulic fracture (HF) in oil/gas fields the most reliable seismic method to avoid the adverse effect of strong surface noises is using downhole microseismic surveys. Nevertheless, downhole measurement is more expensive and limited by the availability of suitable boreholes in the vicinity of the hydro-fracture site.By all means seismic surveys conducted on land surface bear the largest flexibility and are more economic than downhole measurements. As a significant progress in hydro-fracture monitoring Duncan et al developed a surface monitoring system using seismic arrays centered at the hydro-fracture point. This monitoring method requires large-scale and prolonged operations; thus the cost-effectiveness is still less than ideal. In this paper we present a novel approach for land monitoring of hydro-fractures that uses only sparse seismic stations far from fracturing vehicles; and the total number of seismic stations is much less than previous approaches; so that the cost-effectiveness is significantly improved. With a small-scale seismic array on land surface we have monitored the hydro-fracture processes using a vector scanning technique for imaging hydro-fractures and determining rupture focal mechanisms. The applications of this technique to a synthetic data set based on numerical modeling and the real-world field data show that it is able to trace the tempo-spatial development of hydro-fractures even when the signal to noise ratio (S/N) is lower than 0.5. The vector scanning technique significantly shows the fracture imaging quality, and provides us a costeffective approach for monitoring flow-enhancement hydro-fracture processes.