Abstract:Urban lakes play an important role in urban development and environmental protection for the Wuhan urban agglomeration. Under the impacts of urbanization and climate change, understanding urban lake-water extent dynamics is significant. However, few studies on the lake-water extent changes for the Wuhan urban agglomeration exist. This research employed 1375 seasonally continuous Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI data scenes to evaluate the lake-water extent changes from 1987 to 2015. The random forest model was used to extract water bodies based on eleven feature variables, including six remote-sensing spectral bands and five spectral indices. An accuracy assessment yielded a mean classification accuracy of 93.11%, with a standard deviation of 2.26%. The calculated results revealed the following: (1) The average maximum lake-water area of the Wuhan urban agglomeration was 2262.17 km 2 from 1987 to 2002, and it decreased to 2020.78 km 2 from 2005 to 2015, with a loss of 241.39 km 2 (10.67%). (2) The lake-water areas of loss of Wuhan, Huanggang, Xianning, and Xiaogan cities, were 114.83 km 2 , 44.40 km 2 , 45.39 km 2 , and 31.18 km 2 , respectively, with percentages of loss of 14.30%, 11.83%, 13.16%, and 23.05%, respectively. (3) The lake-water areas in the Wuhan urban agglomeration were 226.29 km 2 , 322.71 km 2 , 460.35 km 2 , 400.79 km 2 , 535.51 km 2 , and 635.42 km 2 under water inundation frequencies of 5%-10%, 10%-20%, 20%-40%, 40%-60%, 60%-80%, and 80%-100%, respectively. The Wuhan urban agglomeration was approved as the pilot area for national comprehensive reform, for promoting resource-saving and environmentally friendly developments. This study could be used as guidance for lake protection and water resource management.