Urban Sustainability Maps: Determining Urban Rooftop Dimensions for use in Regional Sustainability Assessments in Auburn, AL

The Urban Sustainability Maps (USM) project will develop a methodological system for creating map-layer assessments concerning sustainable approaches to urban development, using GIS and remote sensing techniques. These USMs will focus on assessing the potential uses of various sustainable approaches to urban rooftop structure and form. The five assessment layers of interest will focus on these approaches: Vegetated Greenroofing, Rainwater Harvesting, Solar Paneling, White Roofing, and Black (asphalt) Roofing. The pilot study for USMs will focus on Auburn, Alabama with some results overlapping with the neighboring city of Opelika due to proximity. The Auburn-Opelika region has grown rapidly over the past several decades so the USMs would be able to provide valuable information related to sustainable development and help inform planning decisions for the city of Auburn. Developing the USMs will require the collection and input of several different sets of data, however, the primary data used for all the analyses will concern urban buildings and rooftop structure. For Part 1 of the study, we are focused on deriving accurate GIS shapefiles for the buildings of interest within Auburn. Generating data on the rooftop dimensions across the region will require the usage of high-resolution LiDAR data, accompanied with high-resolution natural imagery. Supplementary sets of data required will be: Climatic elements (Temp/Precip/Urban Heat Island/etc.), Geospatial elements (land-use/land-cover), and Socioeconomic elements (Demographic/Economic/etc.). With the inclusion of the demographic data, USMs can assess potential effects of sustainable planning on vulnerable populations and how they might be affected from its implementation. The anticipated results will be used to help inform city officials and planners of the feasibility of implementing such sustainable approaches, while illustrating the pros and cons of each approach.