Abstract
Urban growth has been fast for decades. Because money is very important in this urban-based world, humanity focuses on economic development, and is often too busy to deal with sustainability. Therefore, in a world that is constantly changing, creating sustainable cities that contain a diverse range of habitats supporting plant establishment is essential. Some surprising urban habitats in which plants can grow, such as cracks on pavements and walls, rocky areas, abandoned places and roofs might be extremely important for sustainability, while urban spaces are under artificial pressure. In this study, which suggesting a method to create more sustainable green roofs for urban areas, and considering roof vegetation is already important for supporting the ecology of urban areas, we surveyed 37 roofs in an urban part of Trabzon city focusing on the habitat effect. We found 51 plant species growing on these 37 roofs, and determined five different roof vegetation typologies in the research area. The main goal in any artificial green roof is to cover roof surfaces with vegetation, and success is considered a perfect coverage rate. We found roof surface size, species richness, size of the sunlit part, daily sunlight duration, and depth of the substrate are the most effective habitat attributes on vegetation coverage on rooftops in the research area.
Highlights
Even though their ecosystems are always under strong artificial pressure, cities still have many dynamic habitats
Because surviving in urban environment for them is diversionary, they might not be very significant, as city life is often against them with all its dynamics: a thousand people can walk through a newcomer herb in a pavement joint to catch a train, or a man can try to get rid of moss colonization on their roof to solve a drainage problem
If it were possible to find an area that has been isolated in an urban environment, away from the city life and all its artificial components since the 1970s, we would probably be able to see many rooftops covered with natural vegetation, up to 100 percent
Summary
Even though their ecosystems are always under strong artificial pressure, cities still have many dynamic habitats. Rooftops might substitute a green area that buildings already replaced on the ground to reduce the impact on the environment As they may be one of the most promising ecological engineering techniques to increase green surfaces [7], green roofs have a great importance for ecological life quality in cities. While these wild plants can find “brand-new” traditional rooftops as habitat for themselves, it is possible to identify some colonized species among planted green roof plants [20] Having focused on this volunteer plant potential, we considered if this power should be used more efficiently so that ecological quality of cities is higher. Because it is not that easy to find real rooftops, having ideal conditions, covered with natural vegetation in urban areas, some different techniques such as the habitat template hypothesis [21] were developed to find appropriate species for green roof projects. Addressing the following questions is the main purpose of this study: (I) Which species can colonize on a traditional and ordinary roof in an urban environment? (II) Do these species create natural plant composition typologies on the roofs? (III) If yes, what are the visual characteristics of these typologies? (IV) What are the ecological components that these typologies depend on? (V) What are the impacts of these results on the fields of sustainable urban green roof systems?
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