Lakes are very precious freshwater resources. Urban lakes, especially, are quite different from others: they can supply domestic water to residents, provide habitat for fish and waterfowls, and regulate the urban environment (e.g., humidity, temperature, and O
2-CO
2 exchange) [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5]. Moreover, urban lakes can enhance a city’s flood storage capability [
6]. Lake water environment would lead to the spatial differentiation of the urban system [
7]. On the other hand, urban lakes are more vulnerable to urbanization and human activities than other natural lakes. These impacts on urban lakes are mainly reflected in problems such as lake area decreasing and water pollution [
8,
9,
10]. In recent years, most studies of urban lakes have focused on the water environment of lakes [
11,
12,
13,
14]. In addition, a few studies monitored the changes in lake area due to urban expansion [
15,
16,
17]. In recent studies, remotely sensed images have been widely used to extract the lake surface [
18] so that changes in lake area could be acquired from the images in different periods. For instance, in Wuhan, the total lake area in 2005 was 37.4% less than it was in 1991. Although some investigations have discovered that the main reason of lake area reduction is lake infill [
19,
20,
21], there is still a lack of quantitative relationships between lake area changes and human activities. In terms of land resources, human activities or urban development could be represented by land use and land cover change (LUCC). In particular, the proportion of developed land (e.g., residential, commercial, and industrial land use) would be increased, and agricultural land (e.g., farmland) would be reduced in urban districts. Land use change has been studied extensively. Most of the previous studies have paid attention to the fringes of cities to simulate and predict urban expansion through remote sensing (RS) and geographical information systems (GIS) [
22,
23,
24]. Some researchers have assessed the influences of land use changes on climate and analyzed the environmental problems caused by human activities, and then optimized the spatial allocation of resources [
25,
26,
27].
In recent years, a number of studies have proved that there are significant effects of land use changes on urban lakes and other urban water bodies [
28,
29,
30,
31]. Some of these effects, such as lake infill, could even be unrecoverable and irreversible [
32,
33].
In spite of the above achievements, there are still some shortages in the research about urban lake area changes with LUCC. Firstly, the relationships between lake area and land use changes were qualitatively described, without quantitative analysis. Secondly, the studied area in previous studies was usually a watershed instead of a city [
34,
35]. Finally, the land uses in the studied area were often considered as a uniform category and therefore their spatial differentiations with location were usually ignored [
36].
In order to solve these problems, by integrating the spatial information technology such as RS and GIS, this paper tries to quantitatively analyze the impacts of lakefront land use changes on lake area in Wuhan, China. The aims of this paper are to: (1) detect lake areal extents and extract land use classifications from Landsat TM/ETM+ remotely sensed images, (2) model the spatial correlation of lake area and land use changes with GIS, and (3) show the major relationships between lake area reductions and land use changes in the lakefront zones. Xiang [
37] has proved that the desirable buffer widths range from a minimum of 7.9 m to a maximum of as much as 176 m. Du [
20] has compared the land use conversions resulting from urban expansion within the buffer zones of 10 m, 30 m, and 100 m. In this paper, lakefront zones of 100 m from the lake shorelines were delineated.