Abstract Residential yards contribute to human well-being and urban biodiversity. The structure, diversity, and composition of yard floras are largely determined by personal choices and landscaping priorities at local scales, but it is unclear whether these relationships hold across broader geographical areas. We investigated the relationship between homeowners’ criteria for vegetation and yard management choices, ecosystem-service based traits, and yard plant diversity (i.e., taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional) in 145 yards distributed across 6 major cities in the U.S. Individual priorities for a set of ecosystem services were collected with closed-ended questions and reduced into four main principal components using factor analyses: natural, neat, showy and low cost. Across cities, priorities for neat yards were negatively related to overall and spontaneous species richness. Priorities for showy yards were positively related to yard aesthetics (based on showiness of flowers, fruits and leaves for component plants) and spontaneous species richness. Homeowners that preferred low-cost yards had a significantly higher proportion of exotics, and yards with significantly lower functional diversity (i.e., a composite measure for plant height, seed mass, and specific leaf area). The proportion of natives was not related to homeowners’ priorities for natural yards and phylogenetic diversity was only weakly and negatively related to priorities for showy yards. Our study corroborates previous research showing that homeowners’ landscaping priorities are only partially related to their yard vegetation at the continental scale. The disconnection might be attributed to broader institutional, structural, and ecological constraints that prevent people’s personal ideals and priorities from being realized.

中文翻译：

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将庭院植物多样性与全美房主的景观优先事项联系起来

摘要 住宅庭院有助于人类福祉和城市生物多样性。庭院植物群的结构、多样性和组成在很大程度上取决于个人选择和地方尺度的景观优先级，但尚不清楚这些关系是否在更广泛的地理区域中成立。我们在分布在美国 6 个主要城市的 145 码内调查了房主的植被和庭院管理选择标准、基于生态系统服务的特征和庭院植物多样性（即分类、系统发育和功能）之间的关系。生态系统服务的数量通过封闭式问题收集，并使用因子分析简化为四个主要组成部分：自然、整洁、艳丽和低成本。跨城市，整齐码的优先级与整体和自发物种丰富度呈负相关。华丽庭院的优先级与庭院美学（基于组成植物的花朵、果实和叶子的华丽）和自发的物种丰富度呈正相关。偏好低成本庭院的房主拥有更高比例的外来植物，而庭院功能多样性（即植物高度、种子质量和比叶面积的综合测量）明显较低。本地人的比例与房主对自然院子的优先级无关，系统发育多样性与华丽院子的优先级仅微弱负相关。我们的研究证实了之前的研究表明，房主的景观优先级仅部分与大陆尺度的庭院植被有关。