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Assessment of Green Roof Suitability by Active Remote Sensing of University of British Columbia Buildings

University of British Columbia. Campus and Community Planning

Green roofs are a promising mitigation tool against environmental concerns caused by increased urbanization. This study aims to address which of the University of British Columbia’s buildings are most suitable for a retrofitted green roof using active remote sensing. Through the assessment of the six characteristics of buildings, a suitability score was given to all the buildings within the area of interest on campus. The six suitability criteria are roof slope, rooftop area, building usage, building ownership, structural materials, and light intensity. The six suitability characteristics where selected based off literature on existing green roof retrofitting analyzing their structure, types and performance. This study is part of the Social Ecological Economic Development Studies (SEEDS) Sustainability Program to address sustainability policies and practices on UBC’s campus. The building suitability analysis resulted in the detection of five buildings with the greatest suitability score and their total rooftop area being 31,940.80 𝑚2. Each of the five buildings then was further investigated in terms of the vegetation health and density surrounding the buildings to isolate potential concerns of planting in the area. The mean NDVI of the existing greenery surrounding the top five suitable buildings is 0.67, indicative of moderate to high density vegetation. Implementing green roof retrofitting on the suitable UBC buildings requires an additional accessibility analysis to maximize the positive social impacts of increasing campus greenery and make decisions on the green roof structure. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”

Report

eng

2023-09-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85848

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/