The purpose of this chapter is to explore the current trends in land cover change detection and to identify those trends that are potentially transformative to our understanding of land change, as well as identify knowledge/information gaps that should require attention in the future. The current level of understanding of the scale and pace of land cover change is inadequate. However, it is understood that land cover change is an undisputed component of global environmental change. Land cover changes and their impacts range widely from regional temperature warming to land degradation and biodiversity loss and from diminished food production to the spread of infectious diseases. Land cover change, manifested as either land cover modification or conversion, can occur at all spatial scales, and changes at local scales can have cumulative impacts at broader scales. While a large body of work has accumulated regarding land cover change monitoring using remotely sensed data, little guidance exists for addressing large-area change mapping, especially in an operational context thus, in light of the exciting potential for future operational land cover monitoring programs, and in acknowledgement of the large amount of new, disparate meth- ods currently employed in change detection studies in the literature, this chapter presents a review of the key requirements and chief challenges of land cover change monitoring.