The Southwest is the incubator of the country’s fastest growing urban landscapes; relatively young socio-ecosystems of known origins but unknown fates. The region has long-served as a destination for the American dream of the fresh start, the new land; sunlit places far from East Coast stoicism and West Coast angst. Ironically, Thomas Jefferson’s humid zone ideal of an eternally expanding fee simple empire remains most robustly in force and uncontradicted in the deserts of the Southwest. Las Cruces, New Mexico is no exception. The city’s expansion is transforming the Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem at an increasingly rapid pace. It is unclear, however, which parts of the landscape are at the greatest risk of being transformed by urban and residential development, when this development will reach places like the Jornada LTER just north of Las Cruces, and what effects urbanization will have on ecosystem structure and function. As a first step toward addressing these issues, we produced multi-temporal (1980s, 1990s, and today) land use / land cover maps for a 2,400 km² area in and around Las Cruces from Landsat TM imagery. We then completed a post-classification comparison change detection to assess the magnitudes and directions of land use / land cover changes in the study area during the last twenty-five years. Finally, using spatially explicit cross-tabulation techniques, we quantified the relationship between urbanization and human and natural site characteristics such as topography, distance from transportation corridors, and land ownership. In our poster, we present the results of this work and discuss its importance for developing land change scenario models, our next goal.