Human alterations of the earth's surface are widely recognized as one of the planet's most significant cumulative global environmental changes. Increasing population and per capita income suggest that this trend will continue in coming decades. In countries such as the US this process manifests principally as suburbanization. Yet our understanding of the specific causes of US suburbanization and associated consequences is limited because we also lack a systematic baseline description of the location, extent, timing, and rates of land use- and -cover changes where the process is suspected to be important. This poster reports on a project, in the northern Boston suburbs (the Plum Island Ecosystem [PIE] LTER site), to examine one feature of suburbanization that carries significant implications for ecological processes: residential lawncare. The poster presents preliminary results from ongoing research on the multi-scale (i.e., household, neighborhood, state) social drivers of residential lawncare.