Coastal wetlands provide globally significant biodiversity and enormous multiple ecosystem services. The intensified anthropogenic reclamation with economic development leads to loss and degradation in coastal wetlands and their multiple ecosystem services. Understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of coastal wetland patterns in relation to its key natural and anthropogenic driving processes can facilitate evidence-based preservation, restoration and wise use of coastal wetland resources. This study proposes a methodology to identify and capture the spatiotemporal trajectory of the dynamic driving process of coastal wetland pattern based on the characteristics of regional land use change, and to explore the effects of different types of natural and anthropogenic driving processes on spatiotemporal dynamics of the coastal wetlands and their pairwise spatial interactions. The proposed methodology separated the spatiotemporal pattern of natural and human disturbance driving forces, and spatialized and quantified the influence of driving processes on coastal wetlands. Meanwhile, it breaks the static analytical frameworks reliant solely on statistical evaluations of current wetland patterns and overcomes the insufficient research on the spatiotemporal interaction mechanism within the comprehensive driving mechanism of wetland pattern dynamic change. This approach is important and generally applicable for clarifying the complex driving mechanism of the region with drastic landscape pattern evolution under the long-term compound influence of natural and human. The case study of the Yellow River Delta (YRD) showed that: (1) Although multiple driving process trajectories exist for the coastal wetland transformation in the YRD, the spatiotemporal dynamics of coastal wetlands were mainly determined by a few types, among which coastal land reclamation is the most prominent with its greater spatial interaction to the other driving processes, leading continuous loss in coastal wetlands by the encroachment of tidal area and termination of ecosystem succession; (2) Spatiotemporal interactions among the driving processes varied each other, however, the anthropogenic driving processes exhibited greater magnitudes than that of the natural driving processes with their largest impacting percentage (55.5%) of wetland areas in comparison with that under natural (26.1%) and natural-anthropogenic coupled driving processes (18.4%), respectively. The results demonstrate that the land reclamation in those ecological and habitat-sensitive areas should be strictly regulated, and the "scrolling development mode" as a spatial strategy for coastal land reclamation is suggested, which addresses planning and organizing reclamation activities gradually from the inland area onward tidal wetlands by mainly utilizing marginal or fragmented habitats instead of encroaching tidal wetlands directly.