Green Detroit | Devpost

Inspiration

Exposure to nature is a critical resource in urban environments. It is correlated with a:

12% decrease in all cause mortality
33% reduction in prevalence of depression
20% lower risk of heart disease
25%-30% decrease in obesity rate in children and adults

In addition to green spaces are historically less likely to be prioritized in urban neighborhoods low in affluence.

With this tool we hope to make it easier to bridge the gap between inspiration & action.

What it does

Through a web interface find your roof or roofs in your neighborhood.
Receive recommending on tools, resources, and knowledgebases that can help you create your own green roof.
Draft letters to your local representative supporting green infrastructure legislation.

How we built it

To generate our database of potential roofs we paired a publicly available LiDAR hosted by the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) with a map of building foot prints across the Detroit metropolitan area.

This was fed into an analysis process that followed this general format:

LiDAR -> DSM -> slope data -> surface st.dev

In essence we extracted out the variation in slope on a roof top by rooftop basis to determine what surfaces met the requirements needed for a green roof.

Challenges

As it turns out LiDAR data is incredibly dense, with just Lawrence county being 35 GB. Finding ways to download and process this in time in present was unexpected and a significant pivot almost needed to be made. The group member working on this issue, didn't write their first line of code until 12 hours in.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

15 GB of LiDAR data processed (~36 million data points)
90 square miles mapped
1.7 million rooftops analyzed

What's next for Green Detroit

There are many factors we left for stretch goals as we prepared the final presentation for this project:

Incorporation of building age and type when determining green roof suitability.
Utilization of roof size to plan green roof recommendation
Calculation of carbon and storm water reduction benefits generated by each roof.
And many many more.

We look forward to adding this information in future version!