**1. Introduction**

Dense networks of streets, buildings, industry, and transportation interfere with numerous ecosystem processes, affecting the local hydrology, quantity and biodiversity of native flora and fauna, biogeochemical cycling, and microclimate stability [1]. Urban ecosystem services (ES), the benefits humans derive from ecological processes in urban and peri-urban areas [2], are therefore often compromised in population centers, resulting in diminished air, water, and soil quality as well as intensified vulnerability to flooding and heatwaves [1,3,4]. As urban populations grow, the importance of urban ES is increasing: over four billion people now live in cities, a 20-fold increase since 1900 [5,6], and by 2050, urban residents are predicted to number six billion [6].

To strengthen urban ES, green infrastructure, or planned networks of urban vegetated land cover ("urban green space"), including parks, right-of-way planting strips, private yards, green roofs, wetlands, and other natural areas, may be deployed [7]. Urban forests, for example, reduce concentrations of air pollutants, including ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter [8,9]; store atmospheric carbon [9,10]; intercept rainfall, thereby reducing stormwater runoff [11]; provide shade and air temperature regulation [12]; increase recreation value [13]; supply diverse nesting and foraging opportunities for birds; diminish soil erosion; and contribute to stormwater purification [14,15]. Recent biophysical, empirical, and GIS-based modeling methods now allow certain urban ES delivery rates to be quantified [16,17], and economic models allow their monetary value to be evaluated (e.g., [18]), facilitating estimation and comparison of urban green space contributions to air quality [9,19], stormwater runoff retention [20], air temperature regulation [21,22], and carbon sequestration [9,23,24]. For example, urban forests removed an estimated 27,000 metric tons of PM2.5, 523,000 metric tons of ozone, 68,000 metric tons of nitrogen dioxide, and 33,000 metric tons of sulfur dioxide from the U.S. urban air in 2010, providing an estimated \$4.7 billion in annual health benefits [8]. Such urban ES quantification and valuation are then directly useful in deciding among urban land-use alternatives [14,16].

Currently, the lawn is the dominant green land cover type throughout urban and suburban areas of Europe, Canada, and the USA [25]; in 2005, lawn accounted for nearly half of all urban land cover in the USA [26], an area comparable to half of the total irrigated cropland in the USA [27,28]. Although lawns are relatively easy and inexpensive to maintain, enjoy widespread acceptance, and provide some urban ES, under typical managemen<sup>t</sup> they consume extensive irrigation water [26] and are treated with fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that are harmful to fish, birds, and insects [29]. Additionally, lawns store limited carbon [30], and their mowing leads to both biogenic and fuel-related greenhouse gas emissions [31]. They also contribute less to stormwater retention, air purification, microclimate regulation, and recreation than other vegetative land-cover types [14,25,32,33].

In light of this evidence, urban land use planners face crucial decisions regarding the continuation of public lawn maintenance, complicated by pressures of cost, restrictive land-use codes, and uncertain public support, as well as limited land area with which to provide urban ES [34]. In these decisions, the perspectives of stakeholders such as policymakers, environmental managers, and affected residents are critical [2,16,35–37], revealing ES priorities, design preferences, and barriers to green infrastructure development [34,38–43]. The value of stakeholder input to ES planning was first emphasized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005, and the integration of urban ES quantification with stakeholder-expressed urban ES priorities emerged as a central urban environmental planning prescription [2,37].

The essential nature of stakeholder input in ensuring long-term green infrastructure success, combined with the characteristic urban ES provided by specific land cover types (e.g., woodland, trees, shrubs, native grasses, stormwater filtration facilities, etc.), require effective decision-making processes to integrate several lines of evidence. Specifically, quantitative urban ES delivery potential must be evaluated in the context of a possibly conflicting set of stakeholder perspectives [2,4,16,34,37,44], involving an approach that is widely advocated but has not, to our knowledge, been further investigated. To address this need, here we develop and evaluate such a method. We begin by establishing the urban ES currently provided in the study area and surveying diverse stakeholders to reveal their ES priorities. These data next inform the selection of alternative planting regimes that address individual stakeholder priorities and quantitative urban ES delivery, respectively. Comparison of priority ES delivery among these alternatives then guides their integration, yielding a composite regime that improves upon each initial alternative's likelihood of local acceptance while increasing delivery of the desired ES. Notably, this integrated regime could not have been clearly identified by either stakeholder priorities or quantitative urban ES assessments alone.
