Understanding the drivers and outcomes of human land management decisions is key to ecological research and conservation efforts in the Anthropocene. Outdoor residential landscapes compose 20% of urban land area and are designed and maintained by numerous individual decision-makers. Thus, they are ideal places to explore the social-ecological factors that drive human management and plant community dynamics in managed systems. Residential landscaping may advance biodiversity conservation and other urban sustainability goals if homeowners adopt practices that reduce resource use and build wildlife friendly habitat. Numerous studies have linked human preferences and behaviors to yard ecological characteristics. However, to date, few studies have explored how and why people actively change plant communities in their yards, which is of particular interest for increasing conservation efforts in managed landscapes. We ask, how and why do residential yard plant communities change over time? To address this question, we repeated a paired social and ecological survey of 120 households conducted in 2008 in the Phoenix metropolitan area that characterized residents’ landscaping choices and front-yard vegetation and used Google street view to assess major yard changes in landscaping type (i.e., mesic lawn, desert-style xeriscape, or a mix of both) prior to conducting field surveys.
Results/Conclusions
In 2008, 25% of surveyed front yards were lawn, 51% were xeriscape, and 12% were a mix of the two. About 13% of surveyed households have made major changes to their front yards (converting between lawn, xeriscape, or mixed types) since 2008. 75% of changes to front yard lawn area reduced lawn extent. In 2008, 23% of survey respondents expressed a desire to either add or remove grass, but few respondents who wanted to make changes actually have: 15% of respondents who wanted to add grass did, and 25% of respondents who wanted to remove grass did. 35% of respondents reported having made few or no changes to their yards prior to 2008, and 72% of these residents did not wish to make any future changes, indicating a significant portion of yard managers who will likely maintain a static plant community over time. These results indicate that while most residents make changes to their yards over time, large changes happen slowly. Further investigation of the motivations behind resident decisions to make changes may reveal barriers or incentives to adopting change, which can be applied to understand land manager decisions and promote conservation efforts more broadly.