{"id":4348,"date":"2009-09-04T13:21:40","date_gmt":"2009-09-04T17:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=4348"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:35:47","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:35:47","slug":"things-are-looking-green-on-gant-plaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2009\/09\/things-are-looking-green-on-gant-plaza\/","title":{"rendered":"Things Are Looking Green on Gant Plaza"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>The<\/a>
The 'green' roof on Gant Plaza. Photo by Frank Dahlmeyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The University has its first \u201cgreen\u201d roof \u2013 a garden of more than 300 raised beds of sedum and other flowering plants installed on 3,600 square feet of a plaza at the Edward V. Gant Complex.<\/p>\n

The installation was constructed Sept. 2 by a group of faculty, staff, and students.<\/p>\n

The garden, which is intersected by a walkway and includes refurbished benches, will provide a fertile area where faculty researchers can analyze whether environmentally friendly roof gardens actually display the abundance of positive properties they are said to offer.<\/p>\n

\u201cGreen roofs have been around for centuries,\u201d says Jack Clausen, a professor of natural resources and the environment and co-principal investigator on the project. \u201cThey\u2019re predominant in many areas of Europe. But the concept is fairly new in the United States \u2013 maybe 10-15 years \u2013 and there hasn\u2019t been a lot of research, especially in the Northeast.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s about to change. Clausen, Allison MacKay, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and co- principal investigator with Clausen, and Joe Bushy, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, plan to study virtually every property environmentalists attribute to green roofs, including whether it will actually reduce runoff; whether it will improve the quality of atmospheric deposition of water; whether it will reduce the presence of metals in the air above the garden, including mercury; and whether it will help regulate the temperature in the building beneath the garden.<\/p>\n

\"<p>A<\/a>
A side view of the green roof. Photo by Frank Dahlmeyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The amount of runoff the garden prevents will be key.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe average rainfall in Connecticut is four inches per month,\u201d says Clausen. \u201cPrior research shows that a green roof can prevent up to 60 percent of rain from leaving the roof. That\u2019s huge. But the research hasn\u2019t been done in New England. We\u2019re interested in Eagleville Brook, and the total maximum daily load of rainfall that drains into the brook.”<\/p>\n

The project is supported by a $50,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection. The park benches were purchased through the Green Campus Fund at the UConn Foundation.<\/p>\n

On Sept. 2, a group of about 30 students, mostly members of the EcoHusky student group and the student chapter of the Soil and Water Conservation Society, along with residents from UConn\u2019s new environmental learning community, EcoHouse, carted the 334 modules of plants from the area in front of the BioPhysics Building to the adjacent plaza on the Gant Complex. They then assembled the two foot by four foot plastic trays into the design created by John Alexopoulos, an associate professor of landscape architecture.<\/p>\n

Each planter is filled with one of 10 varieties of sedum, a plant that flowers during the summer and fall and offers a range of colors. The sedum for the UConn project grows to a height of about four inches, Clausen says. The plants are drought tolerant but must still be maintained, a task that members of the two student clubs plan to embrace.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first \u2018green\u2019 roof on campus is a fertile ground for University researchers to evaluate the benefits of environmentally friendly roof gardens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[37],"class_list":["post-4348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-20 18:28:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4348"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4634,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4348\/revisions\/4634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4348"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=4348"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}