Sponsor
This research was supported by the Macrosystems Biology Program in the Emerging Frontiers Division of the Biological Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants EF-1065548, 1065737, 1065740, 1065741, 1065772, 1065785, 1065831, and 121238320. The work arose from research funded by grants from the NSF Long-Term Ecological Research Program in Baltimore (DEB-0423476), Central Arizona–Phoenix (BCS-1026865), Plum Island (Boston) (OCE-1058747), Florida Coastal Everglades (Miami) (DBI-0620409), and Cedar Creek (Minneapolis-St. Paul) (DEB-0620652).
Published In
Landscape and Urban Planning
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-2017
Subjects
Biotic communities -- United States, Urban ecology (Biology), Land management, Land use, Urbanization, Lawn care industry, Sustainability
Abstract
Residential lawns are highly managed ecosystems that occur in urbanized landscapes across the United States. Because they are ubiquitous, lawns are good systems in which to study the potential homogenizing effects of urban land use and management together with the continental-scale effects of climate on ecosystem structure and functioning. We hypothesized that similar homeowner preferences and management in residential areas across the United States would lead to low plant species diversity in lawns and relatively homogeneous vegetation across broad geographical regions. We also hypothesized that lawn plant species richness would increase with regional temperature and precipitation due to the presence of spontaneous, weedy vegetation, but would decrease with household income and fertilizer use. To test these predictions, we compared plant species composition and richness in residential lawns in seven U.S. metropolitan regions. We also compared species composition in lawns with understory vegetation in minimally-managed reference areas in each city. As expected, the composition of cultivated turfgrasses was more similar among lawns than among reference areas, but this pattern also held among spontaneous species. Plant species richness and diversity varied more among lawns than among reference areas, and more diverse lawns occurred in metropolitan areas with higher precipitation. Native forb diversity increased with precipitation and decreased with income, driving overall lawn diversity trends with these predictors as well. Our results showed that both management and regional climate shaped lawn species composition, but the overall homogeneity of species regardless of regional context strongly suggested that management was a more important driver.
Rights
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1016/j.landurbplan.2017.05.004
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/25974
Citation Details
Wheeler, M. M., Neill, C., Groffman, P. M., Avolio, M., Bettez, N., Cavender-Bares, J., & ... Steele, M. (2017). Continental-scale homogenization of residential lawn plant communities. Landscape & Urban Planning, 16554-63.