Seasonal fallen leaf removal is a common landscaping practice in urban ecosystems. Yet, we have little understanding of the practice's impact on overwintering arboreal arthropods that may use the habitat seasonally. To assess this yearly disturbance, we removed or retained fallen leaves in low and high-maintenance areas of pesticide-free residential yards in Maryland, USA. We recorded all individuals of 5 key aboveground arthropod taxa emerging over the following spring seasons and tracked environmental variables like belowground temperatures. Overall, leaf removal decreased the abundance of emerging arthropods by 17 %, with some taxa more negatively affected (moths and butterflies-45 %
beetles-24 %, spiders-up to 67 %) than others (flies, parasitic wasps). We further examined the impact of leaf removal on diversity and composition using two taxa important to land managers: (1) moths and butterflies as herbivores and pollinators and (2) solitary parasitic and predatory wasps as natural enemies of pests. Removing leaves reduced the diversity of moths and butterflies by about 40 %, changing community composition by decreasing the number of species that feed internally in leaves as larvae, overwinter as larvae, or overwinter in senesced leaves. Removal also altered beneficial parasitic wasp community composition, but not family diversity, with the most significant adverse effect on wasps in Eulophidae, a family specializing in parasitizing leaf-mining insects. Lastly, we used path analysis to explore how environmental variables around the overwintering site mediate moth and butterfly emergence patterns. While leaf removal led to more variation in spring soil temperatures, higher emergence was directly tied to greater leaf biomass and higher mean soil temperatures in high-maintenance yard areas with low canopy cover. Overall, a management strategy of retaining fallen leaves in yards may conserve insect biodiversity and associated services, increasing the ecological value of residential landscapes across two levels of management intensity.