Abstract: China has a total of33 nature reserves intended for the conservation of red-crowned cranes,covering a land area of 3.099 million hm².The habitats of red-crowned cranes are now faced with severe security problems due to economic development,human activities and lack of an overall design for nature reserves.According to the principle of maintaining regional ecological integrity of ecosystems,iterative methods and integer linear programming were employed to study designing of nature reserve network for red-crowned cranes with the target of conserving 70% and 60% of the highly suitable wetlands and moderately suitable wetlands in the country,respectively.A design scheme was worked out.

Key words: red-crowned crane, nature reserve network, iterative methods, integer linear programming