Municipal regulation of residential landscapes across US cities: Patterns and implications for landscape sustainability.

Local regulations on residential landscapes (yards and gardens) can facilitate or constrain ecosystem services and disservices in cities. To our knowledge, no studies have undertaken a comprehensive look at how municipalities regulate residential landscapes to achieve particular goals and to control management practices. Across six U.

Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change.

The human impact on life on Earth has increased sharply since the 1970s, driven by the demands of a growing population with rising average per capita income. Nature is currently supplying more materials than ever before, but this has come at the high cost of unprecedented global declines in the extent and integrity of ecosystems, distinctness of local ecological communities, abundance and number of wild species, and the number of local domesticated varieties. Such changes reduce vital benefits that people receive from nature and threaten the quality of life of future generations.

Residential household yard care practices along urban-exurban gradients in six climatically-diverse U.S. metropolitan areas.

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 impacts associated with their management, there is a clear need to understand the geographic variation, drivers, and outcomes of common yard care practices. We hypothesized that 1) income, age, and the number of neighbors known by name will be positively associated with the odds of having irrigated, fertilized, or applied pesticides in the last year, 2) irrigation, fertilization, and pesticide application will vary quadratically with population density, with the highest odds in suburban areas, and 3) the odds of irrigating will vary by climate, but fertilization and pesticide application will not.

Climate and lawn management interact to control C plant distribution in residential lawns across seven U.S. cities.

In natural grasslands, C plant dominance increases with growing season temperatures and reflects distinct differences in plant growth rates and water use efficiencies of C vs. C photosynthetic pathways. However, in lawns, management decisions influence interactions between planted turfgrass and weed species, leading to some uncertainty about the degree of human vs.

Assessing the homogenization of urban land management with an application to US residential lawn care.

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 land changes that are increasingly similar. An implication of this multiscale homogenization hypothesis is that the ecosystem structure and function and human behaviors associated with urbanization should be more similar in certain kinds of urbanized locations across biogeophysical gradients than across urbanization gradients in places with similar biogeophysical characteristics.

Differentiation and concordance in smallholder land use strategies in southern Mexico's conservation frontier.

Forest cover transitions in the developing tropics are conditioned by agricultural change. The expansion, intensification, and diversification of agricultural land uses are tied to regional economic/environmental regimes and decisions of local farming households. Land change science and agrarian systems research share an interest in the drivers of household strategies, land use impacts, and typologies of those land uses/drivers.

Abundance of immature Anopheles and culicines (Diptera: Culicidae) in different water body types in the urban environment of Malindi, Kenya.

In this study we 1) describe the abundance of Anopheles and culicine immatures in different water body types in urban Malindi, Kenya, 2) compare Anopheles immature density in relation to culicine immature density, and 3) identify characteristics that influence the likelihood of water bodies being co-colonized by Anopheles and culicines. Entomological and environmental cross-sectional surveys conducted in 2001 and 2002 were used in the analysis. A total of 889 Anopheles and 7,217 culicine immatures were found in diverse water body types in 2001 and 2002.

The association between distance to water pipes and water bodies positive for anopheline mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) in the urban community of Malindi, Kenya.

The increasing risk of mosquito-borne diseases in African urban environments has been partly attributed to failed planning and resource underdevelopment. Though engineered systems may reduce mosquito proliferation, there are few studies describing this relationship. This study investigates how engineered systems such as roads and piped water systems affect the odds of anopheline immatures (i.