The Yellow River Delta is a dynamic-equilibrium wetland system formed via the complex interactions between the Yellow River and the ocean across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Owing to the frequent shifts in the Yellow River’s course, the deltaic wetlands have undergone a cyclical evolution involving rapid formation, development, erosion or succession, and disappearance or remnant persistence. Under the combined stresses of intensive human activities and climate change, the Yellow River Delta is facing a series of challenges, including water and sediment variability, vegetation degradation, species invasion, habitat fragmentation, and functional decline. Many existing ecological problems have emerged throughout the evolutionary process of the delta’s wetlands, characterized by overlapping impacts across multiple spatial and temporal dimensions. Consequently, conservation and restoration strategies based on isolated timeframes, specific sites, or individual elements are increasingly showing limitations in mitigating habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation in the delta. This paper reviews extensive literature on ecological conservation and restoration in the Yellow River Delta, elucidating the influence mechanisms of biotic and abiotic disturbance factors on key ecological components, structures, and processes affecting the ecological functions of coastal wetlands. Moreover, it identifies the stability patterns of multifunctional wetland systems under multiple stressors, proposes an integrated optimization framework combining conservation, restoration, and regulation, and develops multiscale correlated and multiprocess coordinated conservation and restoration measures, thereby providing new insights for addressing ecosystem degradation in this region.
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