Residential landscapes are a common setting of human-environment interactions. These ubiquitous ecosystems provide social and ecological services, and yard maintenance leads to intended and unintended ecological outcomes. The ecological characteristics of residential landscapes and the human drivers of landscape management have been the focus of disciplinary studies, often at a single scale of analysis. However, an interdisciplinary examination of residential landscapes is needed to understand the feedbacks and tradeoffs of these complex adaptive social-ecological systems as a whole. Our aim is to synthesize the diversity of perspectives, scales of analysis, and findings from the literature in order to 1) contribute to an interdisciplinary understanding of residential landscapes and 2) identify research needs while providing a robust conceptual approach for future studies. We synthesize 256 studies from the literature and develop an interdisciplinary, multi-scalar framework on residential landscape dynamics. Complex human drivers (attitudinal, structural, and institutional factors) at multiple scales influence management practices and the feedbacks with biophysical characteristics of residential landscapes. However, gaps exist in our interdisciplinary understanding of residential landscapes within four key but understudied areas: 1) the link between social drivers and ecological outcomes of management decisions, 2) the ecosystem services provided by these landscapes to residents, 3) the interactions of social drivers and ecological characteristics across scales, and 4) generalizations of patterns and processes across cities. Our systems perspective will help to guide future interdisciplinary collaborations to integrate theories and research methods across geographic locations and spatial scales.

Previous research has examined the influence of values on human-ecological decisions, yet disparate approaches render inferences across studies difficult. In this paper, we present a robust conceptualization of values, encompassing general life values, broad-based environmental orientations, and specific yard priorities, while comparatively examining how these influence residents' land-management practices. Coupling a social survey with observational field data in Phoenix, Arizona, we address how 1) diverse values affect residents' multifaceted landscaping practices, 2) yard structure impacts water and chemical applications, and 3) land management varies across distinctive geographic contexts. Overall, values were not strongly related to land management decisions. Of those that were significant, most were related to groundcover and herbicide use. Yet diverse environmental values influenced landscaping practices in varying and complex ways. In addition, the historic and socioeconomic setting of neighborhoods affect the extent of lawns and related management inputs, while heightened use of pesticides in rock-based, drought-tolerant yards challenges the notion of these lawn alternatives as an environmentally friendly and low maintenance choice.

Land use science has traditionally used case-study approaches for in-depth investigation of land use change processes and impacts. Meta-studies synthesize findings across case-study evidence to identify general patterns. In this paper, we provide a review of meta-studies in land use science. Various meta-studies have been conducted, which synthesize deforestation and agricultural land use change processes, while other important changes, such as urbanization, wetland conversion, and grassland dynamics have hardly been addressed. Meta-studies of land use change impacts focus mostly on biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles, while meta-studies of socioeconomic consequences are rare. Land use change processes and land use change impacts are generally addressed in isolation, while only few studies considered trajectories of drivers through changes to their impacts and their potential feedbacks. We provide a conceptual framework for linking meta-studies of land use change processes and impacts for the analysis of coupled human–environmental systems. Moreover, we provide suggestions for combining meta-studies of different land use change processes to develop a more integrated theory of land use change, and for combining meta-studies of land use change impacts to identify tradeoffs between different impacts. Land use science can benefit from an improved conceptualization of land use change processes and their impacts, and from new methods that combine meta-study findings to advance our understanding of human–environmental systems.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0699-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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