It is distributed in a wide variety of habitats including marshes in forests, agricultural areas, and freshwater wetlands across Asia.

[2][3] The woolly-necked stork was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected from the Coromandel Coast of India.

[4] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.

[12] The Handbook and other sources of taxonomic lists use geographical separation as the sole basis for elevating the three subspecies into two species, and this assumption requires to be tested using more definitive methods such as genetics.

[13] When the wings are opened either during displays or for flight, a narrow band of very bright unfeathered skin is visible along the underside of the forearm.

[3] It is a resident breeder building nests on trees located on agricultural fields or wetlands, on natural cliffs, and on cell phone towers.

[13] In an agricultural landscape in north India, woolly-necked storks preferred fallow fields during the summer and monsoon seasons, and natural freshwater wetlands during the winter.

[13] The woolly-necked stork is a broad winged soaring bird, which relies on moving between thermals of hot air for sustained long-distance flight.

[22] Analogous to this change of preferred habitat seasonally, Asian woolly-necked storks in lowland Nepal spent less time foraging (suggesting higher efficiency of finding food) during the winter relative to monsoon when rice paddies was the dominant crop.

[32] The Asian woolly-necked stork walks slowly and steadily on the ground seeking its prey, which like that of most of its relatives, consists of amphibians, reptiles and insects.

[27] Very few nests each year were placed on artificial structures such as electricity pylons, and the majority were placed on Dalbergia sissoo, Ficus religiosa and Eucalyptus sp.

[37] It seems likely that Asian woolly-necked storks support the well-being of many other species, including large raptors such as dusky eagle-owls, via commensal and other inter-species relationships associated with their nests.

[2] It was, however, down listed to "Near-threatened" in 2019 after concrete evidence emerged from south Asia and Myanmar that the erstwhile population estimate was a severe underestimate, and that most woolly-necked storks used agricultural areas and unprotected wetlands, with abundances being lower inside forested reserves.

[2] Agricultural landscapes in north India support considerable numbers of breeding pairs that have relatively large brood sizes and behaviors similar to storks in protected managed reserves suggesting that this species is not an obligate wetland bird and that it is not reliant on undisturbed protected wetlands and forest reserves.

[38] These variations may have been due to differences in count methods and season making it difficult to know if population sizes of this species has changed along the River Mekong.

[3][24][32] The majority of the protected reserve forests and wetlands in south-east Asia are under threat suggesting that woolly-necked storks face an uncertain future in this region.