The characteristics of climatic and human activity in the Hunshandake Sandy Land which is located in the margin monsoon area,determine the vulnerability of ecosystem and sensitivity of environment change. At present,the ecological problems of lakes in the area is very serious,which affects water resource,grassland landscape and local resident's life and production. Choosing 175 lakes which each covers area more than 0.01 km~2 based topographic maps in scale of 1 ∶50000 and combining data with 17 stages of Landsat MSS /TM/ETM/OLI satellite remote sensing images during 1973-2013,we systematically studied the changes of lake areas during a period of 1969-2013 systematically. The result shows that the total area of lakes decreased from 502.04 km~2 in 1969 to 303.42 km~2 in 2013,which presents a shrinking trend overall in 88 shrinking lakes and 85 dried lakes,but only 2 lakes are expanding. Concretely speaking,the fluctuating downtrend of total lake areas occurred from the 1970s to the 1980s,continuously shows an upward trend in the early 1990s,the overall downtrend during 1995-2011,and slightly expanding trend after 2013. In the view of spatial distribution pattern,shrinking and dried lakes are distributed in the desert hinterland of the study area.