As the urban heat island effect and other problems related to increasing climate temperatures become more and more recognized as a global problem, attempts to prevent and mitigate negative outcomes are becoming more popular.  Specifically, cities have adopted measures such as green roofs and have begun to realize the importance of street trees in keeping temperatures low.  Vancouver’s Downtown region is an urban core and temperatures have been recorded at higher values compared to surrounding areas.  Thus, the aim of our project was to examine current vegetation patterns in the city and inquire whether green roofs and street vegetation are possible options for Vancouver’s Downtown peninsula.  Our project involves:

• Studying current distributions of vegetation in relation to landuse zones
• Measuring levels of vegetation cover on streets as well as around building footprints
• Analyzing where street level vegetation and green roofs would be most needed
• Estimation of effect of maximum potential rooftop greening

Through our analysis, we managed to clearly show vegetation distribution in the downtown area. Looking at the vegetation cover by landuse zones, we were able to determine which landuse zones had the highest and least proportion of greenery. Our results generally showed the largest difference between the West End residential areas and the Central Business District commercial areas. Residential and parklands had the highest vegetation cover percentage whereas commercial and transportation/open lands had the lowest amount.

Our street level analysis of vegetation showed a huge difference in street vegetation levels between residential back streets of the West End (over 90% vegetation cover) and streets in the CBD (under 1%). A similar pattern was found when ranking buildings based on surrounding vegetation amounts.  However, there was more variability within local areas here.

Our last step was to calculate the amount of potential space that could be converted to greenery by converting flat roof areas into vegetation. Our estimate was 9.04% of the total study area could be converted to greenery through rooftop greening. This showed that it could be quite an effective method of increasing vegetation cover.  Nevertheless, other important measures such as street level vegetation, would have to be implemented.

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