Residential land is expanding in the United States, and lawn now covers more area than the country’s leading irrigated crop by area. Given that lawns are widespread across diverse climatic regions and there is rising concern about the environmental …
In natural grasslands, C4 plant dominance increases with growing season temperatures and reflects distinct differences in plant growth rates and water use efficiencies of C3 vs. C4 photosynthetic pathways. However, in lawns, management decisions …
Cultivation and spread of non‐native plant species may result in either phylogenetic homogenization (increasing similarity) or differentiation (decreasing similarity) of urban floras. However, it is unknown how non‐native species influence …
*Context*
As urban areas increase in extent globally, domestic yards play an increasingly important role as potential contributors to ecosystem services and well-being. These benefits largely depend on the plant species richness and composition of …
Many factors influence yard care in urban and suburban areas, but the explicit difference between front versus back yards is one factor that has not been fully examined. This paper introduces the Landscape Mullet concept. The two key components of …
Stormwater ponds and retention basins are ubiquitous features throughout urban landscapes. These ponds are potentially important control points for nitrogen (N) removal from surface water bodies via denitrification. However, there are possible …
*Highlights*
*Research suggests residents seek to ‘fit in’ via establishing particular aesthetics.
*This explanation does not meaningfully grapple with back yards, which are more hidden.
*Lawns and nitrogen cycling processes were not different …
Urban ecosystems are widely hypothesized to be more ecologically homogeneous than natural ecosystems. We argue that urban plant communities assemble from a complex mix of horticultural and regional species pools, and evaluate the homogenization …
Similarities in planning, development and culture within urban areas may lead to the convergence of ecological processes on continental scales. Transdisciplinary, multi-scale research is now needed to understand and predict the impact of …
Research on urban ecosystems rapidly expanded in the 1990s and is now a central topic in ecosystem science. In this paper, we argue that there are two critical challenges for ecosystem science that are rooted in urban ecosystems: (1) predicting or …
Changes in land use, land cover, and land management present some of the greatest potential global environmental challenges of the 21st century. Urbanization, one of the principal drivers of these transformations, is commonly thought to be generating …
A visually apparent but scientifically untested outcome of land‐use change is homogenization across urban areas, where neighborhoods in different parts of the country have similar patterns of roads, residential lots, commercial areas, and aquatic …