Variation of landscape pattern can provide key information of human activity effects on landscape and consequently has received much attention in recent years. Most of the past works mainly focused on the whole landscape pattern rather than the inner variation of landscape, and on urban area, watershed, forest and wetland rather than coast as objects. In China, the analyses of landscape change in the Liaohe River delta, the Yellow River delta and the Zhujiang River delta have been conducted at a spatial scale of county although some works have been done concerning the features of coastal landscape at a spatial scale of nation. The study area in this paper, the coastal zone of Yancheng (CZY), lies in the middle of Chinese coastal zone, where shoal area of 4 570 km² can be found. CZY is one of the best-preserved land resources in Jiangsu Province and also in china. Moreover, it is a base of biodiversity conservation. With the population growth, there has been increasingly serious conflict between reclamation and biodiversity conservation in this region. In order to analyse the changes of landscape pattern, four sections in CZY have been selected from north to south and they are the section of salt industry and aquatic production in the abandoned Yellow River delta; the section of breed aquatics and rare bird conservation in Sheyang County; the section of agricultural and elk conservation in Dafeng City; and the section of integrated agricultural development in Dongtai City. The paper mainly deals with the spatial-temporal variation and driving force of the landscape pattern of CZY with the technique of remote sensing and GIS employed. The results indicate: (1) In the 17 years (1983-2000), the number of patches increased significantly but the average area of patch decreased remarkably. The landscape matrix had changed from the station that the natural landscape and the artificial landscape were on an equality to just the latter were dominant. (2) Coastal landscape heterogeneity degraded, resulting in the decrease of diversity index and increase of fractal dimension index, dominance index and fragmentation index. As far as the landscape heterogeneity in the different regions and different landscape types concerned, there was another condition different from the whole coast landscape. (3) It was by the main driving forces of natural geographical condition, population increase, and economic income and government policy that the variation and regional discrepancy of coastal landscape patterns in Yancheng were induced. (4) With the increasing disturbances, such as inning and reclamation of the coastal shoal, the conflict between exploitation and ecological environment protection would be more and more serious. That means a deeply study on the sustainable land use in the coast zone is in need.