Despite the increased recognition of the importance of urban sprawl and landscape fragmentation on social-ecological systems, comparative research on cities across the United States is limited. Therefore, we developed a cross-site comparative study on the land spatial pattern across five LTER sites in the US Southwest. This poster examines the land pattern characteristics for an individual site - Central Arizona Phoenix (CAP). The research area is Maricopa County, and we utilized the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) with a standard land classification scheme that could be employed for a future comparative study. An accuracy assessment of the data source was conducted by comparing NLCD with Maricopa parcel data. The study showed the land pattern difference between the year 1992 and 2001 using six landscape metrics with a moving window analysis. Major metrics were selected displaying the land pattern from different angles, including the patch density, shape, edge, contagion, interspersion, and diversity. The aim of the measurement at the land class level was to explore how urban development changes the spatial distribution of each land class. In particular, during the land transformations, we examined how the natural land area at the urban fringe was increasingly fragmented. Statistical methods were employed to link the quantified land pattern with population, water and transportation infrastructure as a means of exploring major implications for land transformations. The same research methods were applied to the other four sites for an in-depth comparative study.