Researchers had a feeling that people from Los Angeles to Boston kept their lawns in similar conditions, but research suggests that is far from the truth.
"The approach in this study can be used to test other ideas about how people who live in cities--now more than three-quarters of Americans--decide to manage their yards," Henry Gholz, a program director in National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology said in a news release. "This should open a new phase in the field of urban ecology."
The researchers created their "homogenization hypothesis," by reviewing the lawn care surveys of 9,500 residents. They looked for similarities between lawn irrigation and fertilizer habits among the study subjects within the same neighborhoods or in similar neighborhoods within the same city.
The team found that last year about 63 percent of the subjects fertilized their lawns while 79 percent watered them. Many urban lawn care patterns were similar while others were different.
"In Los Angeles, for example, 66 percent of younger residents fertilized their lawns, while 73 percent of older residents did. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, the percentages were similar to those in L.A.: 68 and 76 percent, respectively," the news release reported.
These findings could help cities promote sustainability. Fertilizer is packed full of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that can pollute waterways. This process causes harmful and invasive algal blooms to grow out of control.
"As our country transitions to urban sustainability planning, we need to know where, if anywhere, a common management approach is likely to work," Ecologists Colin Polsky of Clark University said in the news release.
"In many cases, place matters for how people manage residential land. We started this project thinking that all urban Americans managed their residential land the same way: with lots and lots of water and fertilizer."
The study calls for locally-tailored solutions.
"Lawns not only cover a larger extent [of land] than any other irrigated 'crop' in the U.S.," the scientists wrote in their paper, the news release reported "but are expected to expand in coming decades.
"The potential homogenization of residential lawn care has emerged as a major concern for carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and water flows," they wrote.
