The construction of coastal aquaculture ponds has huge economic benefits and is of great significance to ensuring the supply of seafood and enriching the food diversity of residents. The rapid expansion of aquaculture ponds will also bring about a huge environmental crisis, so effectively revealing the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of aquaculture ponds is crucial for orderly management of coastal aquaculture ponds. However, aquaculture ponds are mostly distributed on the side of tidal flats with tortuous coastlines and close to the ocean. It is challenging to identify aquaculture ponds effectively and with high precision. In response to this problem, an aquaculture ponds identification method that combined Google Earth Engine cloud platform and ArcGIS local classification post-processing was proposed. Based on water body frequency, object characteristics and fine processing, the spatial distribution of coastal aquaculture ponds in Zhejiang Province from 2016 to 2021 with high precision was obtained. The results showed that the overall accuracy of the aquaculture ponds was greater than 93%, and the Kappa coefficient was greater than 82%, indicating that the research method showed good applicability. The area of coastal aquaculture ponds in Zhejiang Province tended to decrease in 2016, 2019 and 2021, which was 30360.60hm2, 24375.35hm2 and 21700.02hm2, respectively. The prefecture-level cities of aquaculture ponds were concentrated in Ningbo, Taizhou, Shaoxing and Hangzhou, and the counties were concentrated in Cixi, Ninghai, Sanmen, Xiaoshan, Shangyu and Xiangshan. The agglomeration of aquaculture ponds in Zhejiang Province was decreased, and they were concentrated in bays, estuaries, coastal plains and tidal flats, such as Hangzhou Bay, Xiangshan Port, Sanmen Bay, Puba Port and Yueqing Bay. The spatial differences of aquaculture ponds were prominent, that in the sea side was larger than that in the land side, and that in the north was larger than that in the south. 