LAUSR

Abstract The coastal area of northern Jiangsu (CNJ) is the largest silt coastal zone along the western Pacific Coast. This area is a newly established world natural heritage site and is also the largest winter habitat for the red-crowned crane in the world. However, rapid economic development in the study area has led to great changes in the types and intensities of land-use, which has had an effect on the distribution of wintering red-crowned cranes. In this paper, we first analyzed land-use change and determined the spatiotemporal evolution of land-use types and intensities in the study area. Then, the distribution of the red-crowned cranes was analyzed over various years. Finally, a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model was adopted to study the spatial differences in the effects of land-use types and intensity changes on the distribution of the cranes. The results showed that salt marsh (p