Abstract:
Accelerating worldwide population and speedy urbanization are significant
contributors to the rapidly deteriorating natural green vegetation. Green roofs have
been employed as a sustainable resolution that can perform as a strategy to
reinstate the endangered green infrastructure in urban city resilient programs.
Roofing is a vital component of a building construction that can be utilized to
incorporate green space and it successively generates a natural environment on a
man-made structure. Green roofing can be considered as nature based creation that
has several benefits such as economic, ecological and societal levels. This research
aimed to a) appraise the Centella asiatica leafy vegetable succession on the roof
module and b) assess the gap distance between the drip irrigation lines connected
at the upper section and the succeeding neighbouring irrigation line on the sloping
green roof to efficiently nourish the entire vegetated cover. Appropriately designed
roof covering tiles which are having dimensions of 500mm × 1000mm ×25mm have
been utilized to formulate vegetative green roof tile system. Entire vegetated tiles
cover a space of 5m² on 28⁰ inclined roof. Single drip irrigation line installed at the
top of the roof was used to water the plants. Chlorophyll content, leaf area and
number of leaves per area as plant growth and development parameters were
measured once in a two weeks. In addition, growth media moisture contents were
investigated by taking soil samples at 30cm intervals along the length of the
vegetated area, after irrigating known amount of water from the top. It revealed
that plant growth analysis justified that nurturing entire sloping green roof area
with a single drip line was not effective and it stimulates to apply succeeding next
watering line to augment plant growth up to their optimum level. Experimental
results revealed that the next adjacent irrigation line is 3m away from top irrigation
line. It can be concluded that a single drip irrigation line on this sloping green roof
only can irrigate a length of 3m effectively.
