Governments worldwide are recognising ecosystem services as an approach to address sustainability challenges. Decision‐makers need credible and legitimate measurements of ecosystem services to evaluate decisions for trade‐offs to make wise choices. Managers lack these measurements because of a data gap linking ecosystem characteristics to final ecosystem services. The dominant method to address the data gap is benefit transfer...

Today's worldwide expansion of dry land cities consumes cultivated and native ecosystems, providing laboratories for investigating imprints of former land use in places where people now live. Around Phoenix, USA, we compared soil nutrient pools in residential yards converted from farms with nutrient pools in yards developed on native desert. Organic matter, carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and soluble ions were >2‐fold greater in yar...