New York's Green Roofs Are Crawling With Fungi

Microscopic photo of an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus courtesy of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service. USDA

Demand for green roofs might plummet if they became known as "fungal roofs." But that is what they are, at least in New York – and contrary to what it may sound like, it's not a bad thing.

The world just became a little more aware of the hidden-but-teeming biomass of green roofs thanks to the intrepid work of researchers from Barnard College, Columbia University, Fordham and the University of Colorado. Recently, these guys found themselves wondering if the gardens in the sky might support different kinds of life than the stuff at dog-pee level. It's a realm into which few scientific minds have tread. While green roofs as heat-island dampeners and rainwater-runoff plugs have been widely discussed, the extent to which they serve as urban "biodiversity reservoirs" (in the researchers' words) is something of a mystery.

So in the summer of 2011, the team set out to test the soil composition of 10 green roofs stationed at recreation centers throughout the five boroughs:

(Map courtesy of Jeremy Law at Columbia University)

Using soil corers, they hunted for fungi, because fungal communities play a key role in a roof garden's health and longevity. For comparison's sake, they also took samples from five city parks near some of the roofs, including Central Park and the High Line. A little magic from "[i]nductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy" at Alabama's Auburn University Soil Testing Laboratory, as well as a dollop of phospholipid fatty-acid extraction and Illumina-dye sequencing, and they had their results, which were published this month in the journal PLOS ONE.

So what were the conclusions? 

For one, these sun-kissed carpets of gray goldenrod and smooth blue aster are absolutely crawling with fungi. The researchers logged an average of 109 types of fungi per roof, such as Glomus, Acaulospora, Rhizophagus and Funneliformis, suggesting that green roofs can indeed contribute to urban biodiversity. As they explained:

We found that green roofs supported a diverse fungal community, with numerous taxa belonging to fungal groups capable of surviving in disturbed and polluted habitats. Across roofs, there was significant biogeographical clustering of fungal communities, indicating that community assembly of roof microbes across the greater New York City area is locally variable. Green roof fungal communities were compositionally distinct from city parks and only 54% of the green roof taxa were also found in the park soils.

In other words, the roofs are home to fungi not typically given to squelching around in normal parkland. They also seem to be better for growing stuff you might, you know, put in your mouth: While the soil in New York's parks showed a greater biomass of microbes, it also tested higher for heavy metals, a scourge of urban gardens that can be unhealthy if consumed in larger quantities.

Here's a comparison the researchers put together illustrating how the roofs stacked up against the parks, in terms of the abundance of fungal phyla:

Needless to say, this is hardly the first news of green roofs supporting life. The elevated gardens are routinely patrolled by insects and in some cases much larger fauna. In Australia, for instance, the Adelaide Zoo maintains several grassy roofs that are designed as homes for urban plants and wildlife, like reptiles, insects and bats.

And an immense green roof in the U.K., mounted on a wastewater treatment facility near Brighton, attracts seagulls and crows that pluck at its quaking grass in search of food. To fight those hungry birds, the roof's overseers have released even more animals over the roof – ferocious goshawks, a golden eagle and even a great horned owl.


ORIGINAL: Atlantic Cities

John Metcalfe
Mar 13, 2013

Grow Produce Anywhere In Freight Farms' $60,000 Shipping Container

ORIGINAL: Forbes
6/27/2013

English: Entrance to the towers at MassArt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you like eating locally-sourced produce in the middle of the winter, you’re out of luck. But a pair of Massachusetts entrepreneurs makes a modified shipping container that lets distributors grow, say, local basil in the middle of January. Is their start-up a good investment?

Thanks to customer profits, Freight Farms – it lets customers “grow leafy greens, vine crops and mushrooms hydroponically in insulated, climate-controlled containers” – is not hungry for outside capital.

But should it seek to expand globally, Freight Farms will need outside capital. And those investors will face an intriguing mix of positives – it targets a big market and its founders have done well getting a great idea off the ground – and negatives – they may not be able to block better-capitalized competitors and they lack previous start-up exit success.

Freight Farms’ founders, Brad McNamara and Jonathan Friedman, were fed up with how inefficient it was to grow produce in a rooftop greenhouse. Friedman decided it would be better to use a shipping container.

As they explained in a June 26 interview, McNamara graduated from Northeastern University with a degree in business and earned a masters’ degree in environmental science and an MBA from Clark University. Friedman earned a BFA in Industrial Design from Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Together they started an environmental engineering consulting firm

In 2009, they were working on the design of an urban rooftop greenhouse. According to Friedman, “I was frustrated with the technology for rooftop farming. Despite using double-walled polyvinyl chloride, it was inefficient since so much energy went for heating, cooling, and venting – you can’t maintain constant internal temperature. The operating costs were too high. The numbers did not add up and it could not be done at scale.”

Friedman came up with the solution. As McNamara explained, “The problem was to come up with a large space but more efficient and with a smaller footprint. Jon came up with the idea – use a shipping container — it was a smack in the face. He decided that it would need to fit into a 40 foot by 8 foot space and would be efficient and profitable. Any by using Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), annual lighting power costs are only $2,600.”

It took time to turn that idea into a working prototype. “In early 2010, we started working on the design – looking at components and technology. We needed money so we did a Kickstarter campaign – raising $30,000. The people who contributed money got the joy of helping us achieve our mission of taking local food global. They also got t-shirts, reusable grocery bags and their names on the outside of our first prototype so the world would know that they were among the first to see the future of the food system.” explained McNamara.

After raising the money and building the prototype, they entered a local business accelerator, MassChallenge. And their business targets a specific market. “We decided to target a very specific part of the food system to start off. There are 4,400 institutional distributors of fresh fruit and produce to restaurants, hospitals, and universities. We are selling to small and medium sized distributors with revenues between $3 million and $75 million – representing an $860 million opportunity.”

And Freight Farms is helping these distributors – that ship to customers throughout the year — to reduce their costs. That’s because they buy their fresh fruit and produce from local farms during the harvest seasons. But during the rest of the year, they have to source from further away. By using Freight Farms, the customer’s costs have dropped.

As McNamara explained, “One of our Boston customers imports basil from Mexico that is flown to California and trucked to Boston. He bought one of our containers for $60,000 and uses it to grow a third of his basil – 300 pounds per week – that he sells for $120,000. He used to pay between $3.75 and $4.00 a pound for that basil and with our product it costs him much less.”

Freight Farms has financed its growth through customer payments. “When customers place an order, they give us a down payment that we use to pay our contract manufacturer – we have one in Mansfield and another north of Boston. We will probably seek outside investment as we expand throughout the U.S. and in selected markets in Europe and Asia,” explained McNamara.

And Freight Farms is on a growth trajectory. As McNamara said, “We have three containers being used now, we will ship five in the next couple of months, and 10 will going out in the fall.”

Meanwhile, McNamara believes that its mission of making an impact on the broken food system is attracting top talent. He said, “We now have added five full-time people – with great skills in technology and marketing. They are attracted to our passionate mission of taking local food global.”

But their success has attracted competitors. According to McNamara, “This is a really, really huge opportunity. And in the last few months, it has become widely known. Competition is going to pop up. But we have been working on this over the last four years and we have advantages in design and efficiency. People are our biggest advantage. Our employees and customers are giving us great ideas for how to move forward.”

I think Freight Farms is on to something. I’d guess that if it can get big enough on its own, it would make a tempting morsel for a large truck maker.

Plant-e: living plants generate electricity

ORIGINAL: Plant-e

Technology

Plant-e develops products in which living plants generate electricity. These products are based on technology that was developed at Wageningen University, which was patented in 2007. The patent is now held by Plant-e. The technology enables us to produce electricity from living plants at practically every site where plants can grow. The technology is based on natural processes and is safe for both the plant, and its environment.

Via photosynthesis a plant produces organic matter. Part of this organic matter is used for plant-growth, but a large part can’t be used by the plant and is excreted into the soil via the roots. Around the roots naturally occuring micro-organisms break down the organic compounds to gain energy from. In this process, electrons are released as a waste product. By providing an electrode for the micro-organisms to donate their electrons to, the electrons can be harvested as electricity. Research has shown that plant-growth isn’t compromised by harvesting electricity, so plants keep on growing while electricity is concurrently produced. 

For more information on the technology and recent publications see

www.plantpower.eu

http://cordis.europa.eu/projects/226532

PlantPower - living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production

From 2009-01-01 to 2012-12-31 | PLANTPOWER website

Objective

Living plants in microbial fuel cells might be used as future large-scale Europe wide green energy providers. Such a system can produce in-situ 24 hours per day green electricity or biohydrogen without harvesting the plants. That this might become true was indicated by our first small scale proof of principle experiments describing the so called Plant Microbial Fuel Cell (Plant-MFC) (Strik, 2008, De Schamphelaire, 2008). The Plant-MFC aims to transform solar radiation into green electricity or biohydrogen in a clean and efficient manner. In the Plant-MFC concept, living plants and living microbes form an electrochemical system that is capable of sustainable production of green electricity or biohydrogen from solar energy. By its nature, the Plant-MFC is in potential 5 times more efficient than conventional bio-energy systems.

The technology might be implemented in several ways, ranging from local small scale electricity providers to large scale energy wetlands and islands, high-tech energy and food supplying greenhouses and novel biorefineries. This way, affordable bioenergy maybe produced in Europe as well as in developing countries. Plant-MFCs can be integrated in landscapes invisibly which makes this technology socially highly acceptable. However, exploration of new areas of science and technology is necessary to overcome Plant-MFCs bottlenecks and to make this principally clean, renewable and sustainable technology come true. It is now time to show that significant independent European biofuel and bioelectricity production is possible; we propose that Plant-MFCs can be an excellent choice for our future. We expect that Plant-MFC technology can at least cover 20% of Europe s primary energy need in a real clean and sustainable way. The Plant-MFC concept has several attractive qualities which can provide the significant break through for sustainable energy production in Europe. It will reinforcing competitiveness of Europe since Plant-MFC is world-wide implementable.

Project details

Project reference: 226532

Status: Completed

Total cost: EUR 5 209 687

EU contribution: EUR 3 989 080

Programme acronym: 

FP7-ENERGY

Subprogramme area: 

ENERGY.2008.10.1.1

Contract type: 

Collaborative project (generic)

Results

Periodic Report Summary - PLANTPOWER (Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production)

Periodic Report Summary 2 - PLANTPOWER (Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production)

Documents

Periodic Report - PLANTPOWER (Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production)

Periodic Report 2 - PLANTPOWER (Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production)

Publications (28)

via OpenAIRE

Enzymatic versus Microbial Bio-Catalyzed Electrodes in Bio-Electrochemical Systems

L

Results

aure Lapinsonniere - Matthieu Picot - Frederic Barriere

pH and Temperature Determine Performance of Oxygen Reducing Biocathodes

David P. B. T. B. Strik - Matthieu Picot - Cees J. N. Buisman - Frédéric Barrière

A versatile route to modify polyethersulfone membranes by chemical reduction of aryldiazonium salts

M. Picot - R. Rodulfo - I. Nicolas - A. Szymczyk - F. Barriere - M. Rabiller-Baudry

Tree Museum With a Collection of 2,000 Trees Opens in Switzerland

ORIGINAL: Inhabitat

by Bridgette Meinhold,
06/15/10

Yesterday the Tree Museum opened outside of Zurich in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland, showcasing an incredible collection of 2,000 different species of trees. The museum was designed and built by Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea with the help of Oppenheim Architecture + Design (OAD), who designed Enzo Enea’s new headquarters. The Tree Museum and the sustainably-built headquarters are located on the grounds of a 14th Century monastery, and the museum displays Enea’s personal collection of trees, which he has gathered over the past 17 years.

Enzo Enea selected Chad Oppenheim from a group of eight leading architects from around the world to design the headquarters along with the Tree Museum. Enea chose Oppenheim because he felt that he best understood what he wanted to accomplish with the Tree Museum — the headquarters are designed to act as the perfect backdrop to showcase the trees. The building itself does include a number of sustainable features, such as the use of sustainably-sourced local wood, which blends with the surrounding forest, natural daylighting, efficient insulation, a green roof and a geothermal heating and cooling system.

The Tree Museum houses 2,000 trees on 2.5 acres, with a special installation of about 50 species personally curated by Enea from around the world. Trees are highlighted against sandstone wall backdrops and include 22 different varieties ranging from Taxus baccata to English yew, Pinus sylvestris, and Scotch pine. Enea has collected these trees over the last 17 years during various projects when trees had to be removed from the site. So instead of getting rid of them, he kept them and now has his own special museum, where visitors can view hundreds of trees for a reasonable fee.

Los tejados verdes mejoran el aislamiento reduciendo el calor y el frío que recibe el techo.

ORIGINAL: AMIGOS DE LA MADRE TIERRA

Los tejados verdes mejoran el aislamiento reduciendo el calor y el frío que recibe el techo. Filtra la contaminación y absorve el dióxido de carbono del aire. Aisla del sonido. Hace más frescos los espacios debido a la transpiración de las plantas, reduciendo así, la utilización de aires acondicionados.