In the face of global development, biodiversity loss and climate change in the Anthropocene, urban and suburban areas will need to explore novel strategies to increase sustainability and resiliency. Residential yards and gardens are a unique ‘working landscape’ that provides social and cultural services for the community while having the potential to simultaneously support habitat for biodiversity and provide ecosystem services. In addition, residential yards make up >20% of all the land area in the United States, and >50% of the green space in urban areas, yet receive little attention relative to natural and public green spaces (e.g., parks, forest fragments) across the urban-wildland gradient. In this system, ecologists can engage with other disciplines that focus on privately-managed landscapes (e.g. horticulturists, turf grass scientists, landscape architects, etc.) to understand how to achieve goals that mutually benefit both the environment and the people that live there. A unique and challenging aspect of residential yards, like all privately managed land, is that the features of these systems are driven by the individual management decisions of a network of land owners, and as such is an intertwined socio-ecological system. The mechanistic features of these systems (e.g. plant diversity, nutrient inputs, water management, etc.) are built from a foundation of preferences, values, and historic social norms, and these choices can scale to have widespread effects on the ecological function and integrity of the surrounding landscape. Moreover, the heterogeneous combinations of abiotic and biotic conditions result in novel interactions and outcomes relative to natural systems. This session’s aim is to highlight residential yards as a case study for how human decisions on how to manage land drive a complex socio-ecological system both direct and indirectly. Emphasizing a new perspective of the role of residential properties in providing habitat and ecosystem services has potential to influence the surrounding ecological system, as well as the attitudes and values of the people within. We will highlight new research on the importance of homeowner management decisions to the ecology of human-dominated areas, the potential of privately-managed residential space in conservation and restoration efforts, as well as to identify what some of the key research gaps are in this field.