The Process of Building Green Infrastructure: Schoonover Center’s Green Roof
On July 2nd, 2020, the installation of Ohio University’s new green roof was completed, with it residing outside the third floor of Schoonover Center for Communication.
The installation was completed by Omni Ecosystems, a sustainable green infrastructure company out of Chicago. With Schoonover’s roof built with the anticipation of a green roof beforehand, the installation began with the addition of emergency equipment, such as fire strobes and lights, as well as the introduction of irrigation, electrical outlets and ethernet cords by facilities. Omni Ecosystems continued the process by bringing materials to build five plant beds as well as Parshall flumes for water runoff, one of the first times Omni has used such flumes on a roof.
Nick Petty, a Senior Project Manager at Omni Ecosystems, says that there are three main factors to consider when creating a green roof: positive drainage, public safety, and the health and viability of the plants desired. “The first two matters are endemic to the practice,” says Petty, “If a green roof should cause the primary roof to malfunction, it's a colossal failure. If it leads to injury or damage to property, it's also a colossal failure. Both have legal ramifications that can cost parties dearly and, as such, are never negotiable.”
The latter factor Petty describes as nebulous is the health and survival of the plant. This is a guiding factor in the construction of the green roof itself. “Vegetation may be introduced to a project in different forms and at different costs to a client but, up to this point, every action and every dollar has been spent to promote the vitality of this plant or plant community.” Petty also notes that the client themselves must have a good understanding of the plant they are trying to cultivate to promote its survival. For a green roof to be successful, the contractor and client must do everything they can to fulfill this final factor without breaking the other two conditions.
The plants on the Schoonover green roof were determined with the help of an OU PACE student alongside Dr. David Rosenthal, a plant biology associate professor and a Co-PI on the green roof project. “The seed mix is comprised of native prairie plants,” said Rosenthal, including prairie forbs and grasses from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and others. However, even with the use of native plants, the environment of a green roof is manufactured, and thus not does not inherently have the native conditions these plants are used to, temperature, soil, and polluted stormwater threatening the plants survival. By having a variety of native plants, the seed mix leaves room for failure so that, while perhaps some of the prairie plants may not survive, others are there that may thrive. Due to weight restrictions on the roof, the soil these plants inhabit on the new green roof “is not soil in the pure sense,” says Rosenthal, “rather, it is a special blend of organic and lightweight material that will ‘develop’ into a soil facsimile.”
With the green roof complete, Ohio University faculty, staff, and students plan to use the roof as an area for academic exploration. Dr. Kim Thompson, a plant biology associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, explains that when the roof was originally built, “the original goal was to just have it as a green roof for purposes of being more efficient, it was never intended to be a research or academic space.” Today, multiple projects are lined up, bringing a variety of colleges and departments together.
From the J. Warren McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies, Julio Arauz, professor and director at the school, and William Buehl, a Masters student in ITS, plan to provide “backend services to store, retrieve and analyze data from multiple sensors on the roof,” specifically collecting data concerning air quality and water flow via sensors that upload that data to cloud infrastructure in the McClure data center.
Rosenthal plans to monitor the green roof’s “micro-meteorology” by “measuring air and surface temperatures, relative humidity, incident and reflected solar irradiance” in hopes of learning
“how the addition of the green roof alters the energy exchange.”
Thompson notes that some students are interested in things like pollinator visits, arthropod diversity, biodiversity, bird visits and so forth. She says that her “answer is almost always yes, let's do it” to student projects. Art, geography, Media, Education, Games and Animations, and other groups of majors have all come up with possible projects spawned from the Schoonover green roof.
Time lapse cameras and a 360 camera are planned to be installed on the roof to allow the green roof to be more accessible to broader range of students. Thompson hopes that the high level of engagement and interest so far will encourage greener infrastructure for the school, city, and county. “We have bus shelters for example. We don’t have enough bus shelters around the city and on campus, so if we have a bus shelter can we put a green roof on top of that? There are bike racks that have had green roofs on them. So, there are a lot of creative ideas so that we can get more plants on campus... the more plants we have the better because they take in carbon dioxide, turn it into plant tissue, ...help reduce pollution, and help reduce water going into storm water systems.”
The combination of sustainability, efficiency, and educational efforts that the Schoonover green roof encompasses makes the project unique, something Petty would like to see more of. “It’s no longer enough for something to look good or function within narrow purposes and user groups” says Petty, “it’s got to have a purpose and a means of relating back to the praxis or life – human or otherwise.”
To learn more about the Schoonover green roof, check out the Schoonover Green Roof webpage for announcements, flyers, and more in the future!
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