Abstract: Lakes are important territorial resources and have many functions such as regulating runoff, multiplying aquatic organisms and maintaining the regional ecological environment. They are also an important source of water for agricultural irrigation, industry and domestic use. With the rapid socio-economic development of the Taihu Lake Basin, and the acceleration of urbanization and industrialization, the lake morphology in the region has undergone significant changes. Based on multi-source remote sensing images, the research uses the regional growth method combined with the artificial visual interpretation method to interactively extract lake water information. Through the three main indicators of area change rate, lake landscape shape index（LSI） and lake centroid offset, this paper analyzes the temporal and spatial evolution laws and the causes of Taihu Lake, Gehu Lake and Changdang Lake from 1960s to 2020s. The results show that through a comparative analysis of SuperView-1 and Landsat8 image data during the same period, the errors of the extraction area of three typical lakes are 0.1%, 0.3% and 0.3% respectively. When remote sensing data of different spatial resolutions is used to extract water area, they have little effect on the extraction area of large water bodies such as lakes. The area of the three typical lakes shows the characteristics of decreasingincreasing-decreasing-increasing wave-like undulations. Among them, the lakes shrank the most seriously during the period from 1960s to 1980s, The shrinkage rates of Taihu Lake, Gehu Lake and Changdang Lake are 5.44%, 26.11% and 25.84% respectively. The three typical lake landscape indexes（LSI） show an overall trend of decreasing and then increasing. The evolution characteristics of different lakes have obvious spatial differences. The decrease in lake area is mainly affected by human activities such as polder farming, reclaiming farmland and building construction. An analysis of the reasons for the evolution of three typical lakes can provide a basis for the study of lake protection and the driving force mechanism of evolution in the Taihu Lake Basin.