It's one thing to Photoshop a green roof into a rendering; it's another thing to plant and sustain one. And it's all but unheard of to go back and analyze the state of these living roofs years after their completion, as Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake did for its groundbreaking Green Roof Vegetation Study. The study responds to "a lack of long-term data on real buildings with diverse and dynamic plant communities," according to the firm. Instead of concentrating on one engineering or horticultural aspect of green roofs, the firm looked at "how green roofs function as ecosystems and how they change over time." The jury highlighted two innovative aspects of the study: its comparative method and its ecological thesis. In 2011 and 2012, KieranTimberlake surveyed six of its completed green roofs, ranging in area from 1,744 to 10,000 square feet, and designed between 2003 and 2011. Using the Releve vegetation survey method and the Braun-Blanquet abundance scale to quantify its findings, KieranTimberlake assessed the roofs' vegetative cover, species richness, and species diversity in 2-meter-square sections.
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