Optimized soil moisture monitoring for a multi-sensor green roof and green wall system to inform irrigation and maintenance decisions

绿色屋顶和墙壁是一种基于自然的解决方案，有助于使城市更宜居。它们通过阻止雨水蒸发回大气来缓解城市洪水。蒸散作用有助于冷却城市环境，也可以减少城市热岛效应。绿色的屋顶和墙壁创造了多功能的城市空间，有利于我们的整体健康和健康，创造了城市栖息地，增加了城市生物多样性。绿色行业需要更好的工具来向现有和潜在客户及利益相关者展示绿色建筑空间装置的价值。这些工具在市场上还不存在。由于缺乏有意义的现场信息和关系管理，为绿色设施提供维护的后勤工作受到了挑战。直接数据将通过降低物流成本直接提高维修效率。土壤湿度数据对于确保绿色设施的健康和繁荣至关重要。实时土壤湿度跟踪是农业部门、高尔夫球场和运动场以及城市景观中普遍使用的做法，但很少应用于绿色屋顶和绿色墙壁等绿色基础设施。该项目将优化和测试一种用于绿色屋顶和墙壁生长介质的新型土壤湿度传感器。优化后的传感器将在整个生长季节的绿色屋顶上进行测试，以确定如何将实时土壤湿度数据应用于改善维护和降低运营成本。该项目是开发多传感器系统和软件技术的第一步，可以综合传感器数据，为绿色屋顶和墙壁的灌溉和维护决策提供帮助。

Green roofs and walls are a nature-based solution that helps make cities more livable. They mitigate urban flooding by holding back stormwater allowing it to evapotranspirate back to the atmosphere. Evapotranspiration helps cool the urban environment which can also reduce urban heat islands effects. Green roofs and walls create multi-functional urban spaces benefiting our overall health and wellness, creating urban habitat and increasing urban biodiversity. The green sector needs better tools to demonstrate the value of green built-space installations to current and prospective customers and stakeholders. These tools do not yet exist in the market. The logistics of providing maintenance for green installations is challenged by a lack of meaningful site information and relationship management. Direct data will directly increase maintenance efficiency by lowering logistics costs. Soil moisture data is essential to ensure that green installations are healthy and thriving. Real-time soil moisture tracking is a universally used practice in agriculture sectors, golf courses and sports fields, and urban landscapes but is rarely applied to green infrastructures like green roofs and walls. This project will optimize and test a new soil moisture sensor for green roof and wall growing media. The optimized sensors will be tested in operational green roofs fr a complete growing season to determine how real-time soil moisture data can be applied to improve maintenance and reduce operational costs. This project is the first step towards developing a multi-sensor system and software technology to synthesize sensor data for irrigation and maintenance decisions for green roofs and walls.