Small water bodies serve as fundamental units and key conduits for material cycling and hydrological processes at the watershed scale. However, quantitatively identifying the mechanisms driving their area evolution under multi-factor coupling in different scenario simulations remains challenging. This study focused on the small water bodies in the Chaohu Lake Basin. An Otsu algorithm was applied to establish a basin-scale database of small water bodies, while the GeoDetector model was integrated to reveal the spatiotemporal driving mechanisms of multi-factor coupling behind their evolution. Furthermore, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)–Transformer model was modified to simulate future scenarios of small water body area dynamics. The results indicated that, from 1995 to 2024, the area of small water bodies in the Chaohu Lake Basin exhibited a fluctuating decreasing trend (wet season: 186–269 km2; dry season: 110–253 km2). In terms of spatial distribution, the small water bodies exhibited an unbalanced distribution pattern characterized by wide dispersion alongside regional clustering. Results from the GeoDetector model revealed that land use type (q = 0.711) and evapotranspiration (q = 0.526) were the dominant drivers of variations in small water body areas. LSTM–Transformer simulations (R2 = 0.92, p < 0.01) suggested that, under temperature, precipitation, and land use change scenarios, the small water body areas in the Chaohu Lake Basin will exhibit distinct seasonal variation characteristics, with scenario-dependent differences in fluctuation amplitude and peak–trough timing. These results offer theoretical support for the protection of small water bodies and integrated water resource management in the Chaohu Lake Basin.
Li et al. (Mon,) studied this question.