While we struggle to consistently value ecosystem goods and services within our current economic metrics, green engineering initiatives harness these same goods and services for sustainable but often quantifiably unknown benefits. Ecologically engineered ecosystems, such as planted roofs and raingardens, have become a common strategy to earn green building certification through the United State...

Green roofs are constructed ecosystems that provide ecosystem services in urban environments. Shallow substrate green roofs subject the vegetation layer to desiccation and other environmental extremes, so researchers have evaluated a variety of stress-tolerant vegetation types for green roof applications. Lichens can be found in most terrestrial habitats. They are able to survive extremely hars...

Terrain information is implied in airborne LIDAR data, therefore algorithms should be developed to extract meaning information from them for subsequent application. Especially the building roofs in airbore LIDAR data are very important for 3-D building reconstruction. The difficulty of building roof extraction lies on how to exclude the irrelevant data and to exact them automatically. Therefore...

The installation of roofing materials with increased solar reflectance (i.e., "cool roofs") can mitigate the urban heat island effect and reduce energy use. In addition, meteorological changes, along with the possibility of enhanced UV reflection from these surfaces, can have complex impacts on ozone and PM2.5 concentrations. We aim to evaluate the air-quality impacts of widespread cool-roof in...

Sudden falls of large-area hard roofs in a mined area release a large amount of elastic energy, generate dynamic loads, and cause disasters such as impact ground pressure and gas outbursts. To address these problems, in this study, the sleeve fracturing method (SFM) was applied to weaken a hard roof. The numerical simulation software FLAC3D was used to develop three models based on an analysis ...

Green roofs have many benefits, but in countries with semiarid climates the amount of water needed for irrigation is a limiting factor for their maintenance. The use of drought-tolerant plants such as Sedum species, reduces the water requirements in the dry season, but, even so, in semiarid environments these can reach up to 60 L m-2 per day. Continuous substrate/soil water content monitoring w...

Toronto has declared that every new building on its campuses will be designed to be “green-roofready”, according to Bass. “If the roof can support it and the budget is there, there are more benefits with an intensive roof. You get social benefits, and you may get even a stronger energy benefit too,” he adds. Peck agrees. Emphasizing the need to integrate green roofs into design, he says, “The r...

A solar 3D urban model was developed for the calculation and visualisation of the solar energy potential of buildings, integrating the potential of roofs with that of facades. To assess this potential, a digital surface model (DSM) of the urban region was built from LiDAR data and a solar radiation model based on climatic observations was applied. A shadow algorithm was developed in order to ca...

Segmentation of buildings in urban areas, especially dense urban areas, by using remotely sensed images is highly desirable. However, segmentation results obtained by using existing algorithms are unsatisfactory because of the unclear boundaries between buildings and the shadows cast by neighboring buildings. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed that successfully segments buildings from aeri...