Green Infrastructure, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Details

This work package assesses how the measures taken for implementing urban agriculture (WP2) and green roofs (WP3) affect the resilience of local species and help improve overall biodiversity. It first measures and monitors urban biodiversity. It evaluates the effect of green roof/green landscape on the distribution of microbial biodiversity and antibiotic resistance genes as well as their potential impact on human health.

Green roofs create ecosystem, form corridors that allow for more species interconnectivity and reduce the desert effect of urban centres. More specifically, this task will look at plant, insect, bird populations, aiming to assess the features that green roofs require to harbor biodiversity and the demands for the spatial connections for migration between green roofs and parks. Then, it will study the relationship between green landscape and human health, aiming to elucidate the features that green infrastructure needs to capture air pollutants and to reduce the heat island effect.

It will construct a quantitative measurement method for green landscape to clarify the complex relationship among green landscape, air pollution, and human health, and evaluate the effects of green landscape on human health. Then it will evaluate the benefit and cost of human health in different scenarios of green landscape and functioning for ecology and human interactions, i.e. perspectives (passive) and life style enhancing activities (active, walking, running, playing, performing).