The study focuses on Suzhou New District as the research subject and interprets Landsat series remote sensing images to establish land use data for the area under investigation. It analyzes the evolution of landscape patterns in the research area from 1984 to 2023 and constructs risk plots measuring 50 m×50 m. The landscape ecological risk is evaluated using the landscape pattern index method. The findings indicate significant changes in the landscape pattern of Suzhou New District over the past four decades, primarily characterized by the transformation from arable land to construction land and the expansion of construction land from southeast to northwest, extending from hillsides to lakesides. Meanwhile, the water network pattern and water area have remained stable, and the urban mountain forest area has steadily recovered and increased since the ban on logging. In this process, the study area’s average landscape ecological risk value shows a trend of “increase-decrease-rebound”. The heterogeneity of landscape patterns at different times results in markedly different distributions of landscape ecological risk, and the factors that greatly affected the landscape ecological risk in the high-value area of the region also changed in this process. The dominant factor in the high-value area in the stage of spontaneous urbanization development was landscape vulnerability, the dominant factor in the rapid urban development stage was landscape fragmentation, and the dominant factor in the regional optimization and high-quality development stage was landscape dominance. This study understands the process of ecological change in Suzhou High-tech Zone, identifies and extracts the ecologically weak areas that have been at high risk for a long time, and puts forward regional development suggestions based on the findings to promote the sustainable development of Suzhou High-tech Zone and provide empirical evidence for understanding the ecological environment change in the rapid urbanization process.