The Yellow River Basin has been successfully managed in recent years. However, due to the weak ecological foundation of the Yellow River Basin, problems such as reduced biodiversity, ecosystem instability, and degradation remain. The main problems of ecological environment protection in the source, upper, middle, lower reaches, and deltas of the Yellow River Basin are different. In the context of the Yellow River strategy, the problem of a fragile ecological background is becoming increasingly evident. Regional coordinated development is the target direction of the Yellow River Basin governance. Constructing a multi-objective ecological security pattern and realizing a harmonious coexistence between man and nature are the focus of ecological research in the Yellow River Basin. This study constructs an ecological security pattern for the Yellow River Basin from the perspective of regional cooperation. The main contribution is to construct a comprehensive resistance evaluation system for the basin from three aspects: natural environment (land), human activities (people), and land barrier (human-land coupling), based on the integrated data from ecological, economic, and social levels, and to propose a new framework for constructing ecological security pattern in the entire Yellow River Basin. Specific contents include: (1) identifying ecological source areas in the Yellow River Basin based on morphological spatial pattern and landscape connectivity methods; (2) constructing a comprehensive resistance evaluation system from three aspects-natural environment, human activities and land barrier-and ranking the ecological security of the Yellow River Basin; and (3) combining it with the minimum cumulative resistance model, the ecological corridor extraction and strategic point identification were carried out in the Yellow River Basin. The results showed that the number of ecological source patches in the Yellow River Basin was 75, covering 23.13×10⁴ km², accounting for 29.09% of the total area of the basin. The high security area was 17.83×10⁴ km², the medium security area was 27.83×10⁴ km², and the low security area was 33.84×10⁴ km², accounting for 22.43%, 35.00% and 42.57% of the total basin area, respectively. The basin had 94 ecological corridors with an average length of 37,503 m, and the main land types were grassland and forest. There were 12 ecological strategic points in the basin, mainly distributed in the east of the Yellow River Basin, with relatively high resistance values. This can easily become a "bottleneck" affecting the connectivity of the Yellow River Basin. Finally, the impact of ecological security pattern construction on the overall ecological protection of the Yellow River Basin and the existing ecological environment protection plans for the Yellow River Basin were discussed. Suggestions for future ecological security pattern optimization in the Yellow River Basin were proposed by optimizing the identification of ecological source areas using a water resource assessment system, optimizing the identification of ecological corridors and strategic points based on circuit theory combined with the migration of indicator species, to provide evaluation and optimization strategies and methods for constructing the spatial and temporal allocation of resources in the Yellow River Basin. Genetic analysis showed that the prominent ecological degradation problems, such as grassland desertification and wetland meadow reduction, water-sediment relationship, soil problems and river pollution, water and sediment change, agricultural non-point source pollution, and wetland biodiversity reduction were the reasons for the low ecological security level in the upper, middle, and lower reaches for the Yellow River Basin. Simultaneously, this study establishes a basin-scale paradigm of ecological protection allocation pattern and jointly promotes high-quality economic development and high-level ecological environment protection in the Yellow River Basin.