Green Roof Rehabilitation

During my summer as a Research Assistant at Carleton University, I contributed to a summer-long rehabilitation of the Canal Building green roof. Working with three other undergraduate research assistants, we developed a plan to document the green roof throughout the summer while regularly irrigating, aerating, and fertilizing to improve vegetation cover and plant health. We set up two control zones to remain untouched and four test zones for intervention. Every one to two weeks, we collected regular and thermal photos of the zones, along with monthly drone photos and soil samples at the beginning and end of the experiment. We then analyzed the results to evaluate the effectiveness of our interventions.

Goal

The goal of the project was to restore the Canal Building green roof by increasing plant coverage and overall health, thereby improving the roof’s ecological performance. The roof had been left unmaintained for several years, resulting in poor plant health and dry conditions. By implementing simple solutions, such as weeding, irrigation, fertilization, aeration, and establishing a maintenance schedule. We were able to substantially improve vegetation quality over the course of the summer.

Challenges

Two main challenges arose during the project. The first was maintaining a consistent monitoring schedule. Cloud coverage and variable weather affected the timing of photos, and balancing this with other projects made it difficult to collect images every week. We managed to capture data approximately every two weeks.

The second challenge occurred when an unexpected worker entered the roof and removed many of the plants we had been cultivating, temporarily reversing progress. This unexpected intervention complicated our ability to track improvements accurately, but we adapted our analysis to account for these disruptions.