This paper presents a method for in-situ determining sediment oxygen demand (SOD) in cultivation pond. This method based on sediment surface structure, temperature, and other determining conditions like those in shrimp cultivation environments, overcomes defects of old methods and provides more accurate estimation of SOD's effect on dissolved oxygen in culture waters. Our experiment shows that the sediment surface structure and temperature had imortant effect on SOD in culture water. Different SOD values were derived from different parts of oxygen consumption curves of sediment, because the curves were not linear. According to the oxygen consumption curves of sediment and saturated DO in culture water, it was thought more suitable to calculate SOD with dissolved oxygen reduction from 5.0 to 2.0 mg/l. This method to determine the SOD of shrimp ponds yielded satisfactory results.