Yards, block groups, and vegetation cover measures

Residential yards are a significant component of urban socio-ecological systems; residential land covers 11% of the United States and is often the dominant land use within urban areas. Residential yards also play an important role in the sustainability of urban socio-ecological systems, affecting biogeochemical cycles, water, and the climate via individual- and household-level behaviors. Vegetation, such as trees and grasses, are unevenly distributed across front and back yards, and we sought to understand how similar yards are to each other when compared to their neighboring yards and neighborhoods using aerial imagery. There are many ways to measure yard similarity, and we compared several measures to account for different definitions of 'neighborness'. We examined the spatial autocorrelation of several yard vegetation characteristics in both front and backyards in Boston, MA, USA. Our study area included 1,027 Census block groups (sub-neighborhood areas) and 175,576 parcels with matched front-backyard pairings (n = 351,152 yards in total) across Boston's metropolitan area. This data package contains 1) 351,152 yard spatially-referenced yard polygons with five measures of vegetation summarized, 2) the containing block groups, and 3) and *.R script that replicates the analyses reported in Locke, D. H., Ossola, A., Minor, E., & Lin, B. B. (2021). Spatial contagion structures urban vegetation from parcel to landscape. People and Nature, 00, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10254