CityRoof

CityRoof aims to develop analogous green roofs for delivering ecosystem services in the urban environment. The project will contribute by improving the sustainability of the built environment through the integration of recycled materials within green roofs. Furthermore, the potential impact of green roofs on urban heat island effect and water runoff will be assessed at the city scale.

New ecosystems driven by humans are rapidly dominating the biosphere and its functioning. Understanding these ecosystems and their capacity to deliver ecosystem services for the benefit of society is a crucial challenge. Green roofs are becoming increasingly popular owing to the unavailability of land for developing green infrastructure within the urban environment. Green roofs offer multiple ecosystem services, such as maintaining the biodiversity and ecological connectivity between natural areas, regulation of climate and water, and cultural services. Despite the benefits to the ecosystem, the development of green roofs is limited in the cities due to the financial cost. In this project, we unravel the complex interactions among ecological, built, and human environments for a novel ecosystem ‘green roofs’ - and the way those interactions influence ecosystem delivery for the development of nature-based urban green infrastructures. The project studies the urban environment of cities in Belgium. Specific goals of the project are:

1. To assess the capacity of extensive green roofs to develop analogous habitats for native dry grassland biodiversity that contribute to regional ecological networks;
2. To disentangle interactions between plant functional diversity and abiotic conditions in analogous green roofs and their influence on water and temperature regulation;
3. To assess the contribution of analogous green roofs to building environment sustainability through using recycled building materials and to assess the contribution of analogous green roofs to temperature/water budget of buildings;
4. To evaluate the potential of cities to develop analogous green roof networks and to assess the global contribution of green roof networks to regulatory and non-material ecosystem services.

LEMA contributes to evaluating the potential of analogous green roof networks at a city scale along with assessing the global contribution of green roof networks to regulatory and non-material ecosystem services. Our contribution aims to quantify and upscale the effect of analogous green roofs on ecosystem services at a landscape scale using regional-scale modelling and citizen perception/participation analysis.

The project is coordinated by Prof. Gregory Mahy, Biodiversity and Landscape Gembloux AgroBio-Tech, the University of Liege along with Prof. Luc Courard, GeMMe Building Materials group and Prof. Jacques Teller, Local Environment Management and Analysis Research Group.

Supervisor: Prof. Jacques Teller

Researcher: Mitali Joshi

Funding: The total budget of the project is € 764.850. The project is funded by an ARC Research Grant.

Project start date: October 2019