Ecological safety for egrets means that the ecosystem in which they live provides the conditions necessary for sustaining life. The healthof wildlife species depends on safe habitats, which consist of both living and non-living elements. As a result, egrets’ ecological safety can be understood as the maintenance of ecological suitability in spite of anthropogenic impacts. The safety of the habitats is the primary issue in egrets’ ecological safety assessment. This paper reports on the results of a study of two major breeding habitats and ten typical foraging habitats of egrets along the Xiamen coast, locations selected to assess the ecological safety of the egrets which live in that area. Breeding habitats cover the entire land area and the inter-tidal area of Dayu and Jiyu islets which have been designated as the Xiamen National Nature Reserve.The foraging habitats cover all types of wetland along the Xiamen coast, including mudflat, estuary, mangroves, reservoirs and semi-salty lake. In this study, ecological safety assessment focused on the breeding and foraging habitats of the egrets, with the objective of assessing the extent to which the needs of egrets can be satisfied and maintained by the breeding and foraging habitats. In this paper, ecological suitability and the impacts from humans are considered as the two major factors affecting the egrets’ ecological safety. Therefore, the ecological safety assessment has two components. Thefirstevaluates the ecological conditions maintaining the egrets’ sustainable lives while the secondevaluates how human disturbances are affecting these ecological conditions. By calculation and assigning a value to the assessment, an ecological indicators system was adopted. For the human impact assessment, we used different land-use types to represent different degrees of human impacts,and assigned an assessment value for each land-use type. In addition, geographic information system analysis software- Mapinfo7.0 and ArcView3.2a were applied to analyze the impacts of different human activities on egrets’ habitats. Combining the results of these two assessments, a measure of the egrets’ ecological safety in Xiamen Nature Reserve can be obtained by using a synthetical assessment function: ES=S-D×wD. Egrets’ ecological safety assessment can be divided into five levels: safe, marginally safe, moderate, weak safe and unsafe. Results of the study show that both the Jiyu islet and Dayu islet are at the safe level as breeding habitats, with Jiyu islet rated higher in this range. In contrast, the tenforage habitats are at marginally safe level on a whole, although no forage habitat is at safe level.