In this study, a method for dynamically establishing ship domain in inland waters is proposed to help make decisions about ship collision avoidance. The surrounding waters of the target ship are divided to grids and then calculating the grid densities of ships in each moment to deter-mine the shape and size of ship domain of different types of ships. At last, based on the spatiotem-poral statistical method, the characteristics of ship domains of different types of ship in different navigational environments were analyzed. The proposed method is applied to establish ship domains of different types of ship in Wuhan section of the Yangtze River in January, February, July, and August in 2014. The results show that the size of ship domain increases as the ship size increases in each month. The domain size is significantly influenced by the water level, and the ship domain size in dry seasons is larger than in the wet seasons of inland waters.@en