As the climate continues to warm, and extreme weather events are more frequent and stronger, New York City must adapt to these changes to maintain the health and well-being of its population. Green roofs are a way to do so; they provide environmental benefits such as surface temperature mitigation, stormwater management, and biodiversity conservation that improve the resiliency and adaptive capacity of the city. However, even though the benefits of green roofs have been greatly studied, and a need to implement them on a widescale in cities is inarguable, only 0.1% of NYC’s 1 million rooftops have green roofs. Greening From the Rooftops was developed to transform the scientific literature on green roofs into a tool that the average person and decision maker can use. It visualizes and maps potential rooftops for implementing green roofs, and calculates the environmental benefits the potential green roof would bring if installed.
Tools used: MongoDB, D3.js, Express, Node, Mapbox, QGIS, GDAL, JQ, and Tippecanoe.