Abstract
Green roofs have been heralded as a “sustainable building practice” in cities throughout the world as one response to mounting environmental stresses. A range of stressors plus erosion of aesthetics and human well being in urban areas have initiated policies and practices often with incentives to develop green infrastructure such as green roofs. They provide a suite of public and private benefits most of which map onto services generally provided by the ecosystem. Green roof development imbeds in environmental design processes and is constrained by both human and environmental factors.
As relatively small, simple, anthropogenic ecosystems, green roofs relate to several existing conceptual and applied ecological ideas. Understanding and applying from ecology and ecosystem studies, ecological engineering, managed ecosystems, construction ecology, urban ecology, landscape ecology, restoration ecology, reconciliation ecology, soil ecology and community ecology show green roof ecosystems can be created to cycle energy and nutrients. Furthermore, green roofs can be constructed to model an ecosystem and may provide a setting for testing ecological concepts. This book takes an ecosystems approach to describing a large number of interactions on green roofs placing them in the total human ecosystem.
Keywords
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A UN-Lincoln Fleming Horticulture Research Grant to R. Sutton supported his editing and writing for this book.
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Sutton, R. (2015). Introduction to Green Roof Ecosystems. In: Sutton, R. (eds) Green Roof Ecosystems. Ecological Studies, vol 223. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14983-7_1
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