After over three years of brainstorming, preparation and hard work, the Schoonover Center green roof is finally finished.
Ever since the first grant for the project was written in 2017, Kim Thompson, an associate professor of instruction of environmental and plant biology, has been working tirelessly with her team to finalize the green roof.
Initially the project was supposed to be finalized by March 2020, but was heavily delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thompson is excited to see her project come to fruition, with such drastically good results.
“The installation went pretty smoothly, and the plants started coming up within a couple of weeks, which was astounding,” Thompson said. “It’s been seven and a half weeks since it was planted and we have lots of beautiful vegetation there.”
Before the beautiful vegetation like yellow coreopsis and bergamot were a part of the roof, there were several steps to prep the area. First, the roofing company came in and put down foam and pads, which set the stage for the installers, who came from Michigan to put in the five beds that reside on top of Schoonover.
The entire installation, including the intricate detailing within each bed-like pool liner to keep water in and inoculation with a microbial community, took a mere couple of days. The installers started on June 30 and finished on July 3.
Prior to the installation, Thompson and the green roof team took safety measures for the roof as well, like installing a fire alarm system, safety lights and electrical outlets for equipment. They also installed an ethernet cord on the roof with the intent of setting up a streaming camera so people can stream the green roof and the work on the green roof. The team is finalizing the streaming camera right now.
“The whole rooftop is not planted, which that’s one way to do it – we could’ve just planted the entire rooftop, but because we built this partly for research purposes and we want to do education on it, we set it up so that we can have some equipment there,” Thompson said.
Austin Gray, a senior studying wildlife and conservation biology, is one of the students utilizing the green roof for research purposes.
At the end of July, he began his microbiome project, which entails going to the green roof and collecting samples of the soil that’s laid down and handing them off to a geneticist once he has enough samples collected.
“I've never really done much with the microbiome, and then in the spring Dr. Thompson actually reached out to me and said that she was looking for a student to do a project of the microbiome there, and I knew that I was getting ready to graduate next spring, so I knew this would be a really good opportunity to do a research project before I finish my undergrad,” Gray said.
Alexandra Sines, a first-year masters student studying science in environmental studies, got involved with the green roof as a senior by writing literature summaries and programming the sensors deployed on the roof. Now, she’s working on educational materials so the green roof can be easily incorporated into class curriculum.
“I got involved in the green roof project because I had heard about green roofs before and I thought that they were awesome, so I wanted to help bring them to our campus and teach others about them,” Sines said in an email. “The thing that's so interesting about green roofs to me is the ability to utilize a formerly blank space while incorporating nature into the human environment and boosting sustainability.”
The green roof is only open to people who have active research projects or arts projects, and will stay that way, as there is only room for about four to five people on the roof at a time. However, the green roof team is continuously working to create other resources that engage students and Athens residents in the work being done with the green roof.
That’s part of what Sines love the most about the green roof – making it accessible.
“I love how this project is so interdisciplinary, with many different departments working together to design, monitor, maintain and share this space,” Sines said in an email. “It’s also fascinating to me how accessible we can make it using technology.”
Sines, Gray and Thompson all agree that the best part of the roof is seeing the impact on OU and Athens as a whole.
“More green infrastructure means better resource use, which leads to a more prosperous community,” Sines said in an email. “Being a leader in sustainability also sets our town and university apart from others.”
