For the majority of Americans, lawns and gardens are among the most familiar and often encountered urban green spaces.  According to recent nationwide surveys, approximately 80% of U.S. households manage more than 128,000 km² of lawns and gardens. With continued expansion of urbanized landscapes, these numbers are expected to increase. Although lawns and gardens have some social and environmental benefits, their creation and maintenance are also associated with many negative environmental effects (e.g., pollution from pesticide applications). Given their ubiquity, familiarity, and unique social and ecological characteristics, lawns and gardens provide an appropriate and useful focus for advancing our theoretical, applied and integrated understanding of urban social-ecological systems. Historically, horticulturists, entomologists, and turf grass scientists have been the primary investigators of lawns and gardens through research focusing on plant aesthetics and health, and pest control. Little research has been conducted about the broader ecological and social dimensions of creating and managing lawns and gardens. The objective of this talk is to present an interdisciplinary, holistic conceptual framework that can be used by scientists, landscape managers, policy makers, and educators for examining lawns and gardens as complex social-ecological systems.

Results/Conclusions

The phrase ecological landscaping was adopted to describe a holistic perspective for analyzing the products and processes of lawn and garden management. An interdisciplinary ecological landscaping framework was created using a traditional ecosystem model to describe the inputs, internal transformations, and outputs of biophysical and sociocultural variables associated with individual landscape parcels, which are defined by ownership and management boundaries. The development of this framework resulted in two important insights for approaching the social-ecological study of lawns and gardens and the development scientifically-informed ecological landscaping guidelines. These are that 1) variables not considered part of the traditional landscaping endeavor and 2) cross-scale relationships among internal parcel characteristics and those of the surrounding environment must both be considered to achieve a more holistic understanding of the social and ecological causes and consequences of lawn and garden design and management decisions. The ecological landscaping framework provides a foundation for future research about the socio-ecological characteristics and dynamics of lawns and gardens and how they can be managed to achieve more sustainable urbanized environments. In addition, the framework has utility for environmental education programs which can use lawns and gardens as ubiquitous urban laboratories for exploring ecological concepts and human-environment relationships.