Understanding spatial and temporal variation in land use and land cover is a topic that bridges a variety of disciplines such as ecology, geography, sociology, and economics. Land-use and land-cover change has major impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Our goals are to introduce key concepts regarding land-use and land-cover change, provide insight on the quantification of such change, and illustrate how spatial patterns can be quantified at different scales using an example from the Southeast United States. We first discuss some foundational concepts and terms that capture key aspects of land-use and land-cover change, including conceptual models that have been advanced and problems of habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation. We then provide an overview on common ways in which spatial patterns are quantified, focusing primarily on the quantification of variation in composition and configuration of land use and land cover at different spatial scales, such as pattern that arises at the patch, neighborhood, and entire landscape scales. Our example highlights the ways in which this variation in pattern can capture different components of landscapes considered to be important for biodiversity, such as habitat edge and isolation, and that many of the ways in which spatial pattern of land use and land cover are quantified are highly correlated. We end by illustrating the use of neutral landscape models, which have been used in both theoretical and applied problems for understanding patterns of land-use and land-cover change.