Inland aquaculture ponds, as an important land use type, have brought great economic benefits to local people but at the same time have caused many environmental problems threatening regional ecology security. Therefore, understanding the spatiotemporal pattern of aquaculture ponds and its potential influence on water quality is vital for the sustainable development of inland lakes. In this study, based on Landsat5/8 images, three types of land features, namely spectral features, index features, and texture features, and five machine learning algorithms, namely random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), artificial neural network (ANN), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and Gaussian naive Bayes (GNB), were combined to identify aquaculture ponds and some other primary land use types around a typical inland lake of China. The results demonstrated that the XGBoost algorithm that integrated the three features performed the best among all groups of the five machine learning algorithms and the three features, with an overall accuracy of up to 96.15%. In particular, the texture features provided additional useful information besides the spectral features to allow more accurately separation of aquaculture ponds from other land use types and thus improve the land use mapping ability in complex inland lakes. Next, this study examined the tendency of aquaculture ponds and found a segmented increase mode, namely sharp increase during 1984–2003 and then slow elevation since 2003. Further positive correlation detected between the area of aquaculture ponds and the phytoplankton population dynamics suggest a likely influence of aquaculture activity on the lake water quality. This study provides an important scientific basis for the sustainable management and ecological protection of inland lakes.

Aquaculture Ponds Identification Based on Multi-Feature Combination Strategy and Machine Learning from Landsat-5/8 in a Typical Inland Lake of China