Spatiotemporal change patterns of urban lakes in China’s major cities between 1990 and 2015

China has experienced unprecedented urbanization in the past decades, resulting in dramatic changes in the physical, limnological, and hydrological characteristics of lakes in urban landscapes. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics in distribution and abundance of urban lakes in China remain poorly understood. Here, we characterized the spatiotemporal change patterns of urban lakes in China’s major cities between 1990 and 2015 using remote-sensing data and landscape metrics. The results showed that the urban lake landscape patterns have experienced drastic changes over the past 25 years. The total surface area of the urban lakes has decreased by 17,620.02 ha, a decrease of 24.22%, with a significant increase in the landscape fragmentation and a reduction in shape complexity. We defined three lake-shrinkage types and found that vanishment was the most common lake-shrinkage pattern, followed by edge-shrinkage and tunneling in terms of lake area. Moreover, we also found that urban sprawl was the dominant driver of the lake shrinkage, accounting for 67.89% of the total area loss, and the transition from lakes to cropland was also an important factor (19.86%). This study has potential for providing critical baseline information for government decision-making in lake resources management and urban landscape design.