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Exurban residential settings are relevant for understanding how societal desires for open space impact landscapes and their ecosystem services. In a 2005 image-based web survey of 468 exurban homeowners in southeast Michigan, we investigated how exurban home-buying choices may be related to having open space nearby, and we measured homeowners’ relative preferences for seven different types of open spaces characterized by different ecosystem services. Our study confirms that nearby open space is important to exurban homeowners, but it suggests that homeowners are somewhat heterogeneous in their preferences for different types of open spaces. They generally prefer forests, lakes, and streams, but their preferences for wetlands, prairies, playgrounds, and golf courses vary somewhat with education, age, or having children. In addition, homeowners for whom open space was less important when they bought their home had somewhat different preferences. We discuss the implications for protecting ecosystem services in planning, design, and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Cultural norms for landscape appearance may affect preferences for and adoption of ecological design in exurban residential landscapes, a rapidly growing land use that covers a larger area than all other urban land uses in America combined. We conducted an image-based web survey of 494 southeast Michigan exurban homeowners to investigate the influence of implicit neighborhood norms as well as broader cultural norms on individual preferences for six alternative front yard designs ranging from conventional yards dominated by mown turf to mature native woodlands and native prairie garden designs. Respondents were randomly assigned to see images of one of three types of nearby neighbors’ yards: all conventional, all ecologically innovative, or a mix. They rated front yard design alternatives in one of these three neighborhood contexts. Both broad cultural norms for conventional front yards and neighborhood norms significantly affected homeowners’ preference for their own yards. However, neighborhood norms most dramatically affected preference: the rank of the most conventional and most ecologically beneficial front yard designs was reversed depending upon the design of nearby neighbors’ yards. We conclude that efforts to introduce ecologically innovative designs to metropolitan residential landscapes should approach change at the neighborhood scale in order to enhance initial success and long term cultural sustainability. We also note that individuals who innovate on their own properties may want to enlist nearby neighbors in similar innovations to create a threshold of cultural sustainability. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We describe empirical results from a multi-disciplinary project that support modeling complex processes of land-use and land-cover change in exurban parts of Southeastern Michigan. Based on two different conceptual models, one describing the evolution of urban form as a consequence of residential preferences and the other describing land-cover changes in an exurban township as a consequence of residential preferences, local policies, and a diversity of development types, we describe a variety of empirical data collected to support the mechanisms that we encoded in computational agent-based models. We used multiple methods, including social surveys, remote sensing, and statistical analysis of spatial data, to collect data that could be used to validate the structure of our models, calibrate their specific parameters, and evaluate their output. The data were used to investigate this system in the context of several themes from complexity science, including have (a) macro-level patterns; (b) autonomous decision making entities (i.e., agents); (c) heterogeneity among those entities; (d) social and spatial interactions that operate across multiple scales and (e) nonlinear feedback mechanisms. The results point to the importance of collecting data on agents and their interactions when producing agent-based models, the general validity of our conceptual models, and some changes that we needed to make to these models following data analysis. The calibrated models have been and are being used to evaluate landscape dynamics and the effects of various policy interventions on urban land-cover patterns. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]