Greystone Falls is a typical luxury apartment complex . The buildings were designed to make apartment living as easy and as much like owning a home as possible. However, it is obvious that little consideration went into the landscape. It currently includes the common arrangement of evergreen bushes, liriope, grasses, and a few small trees thrown here and there. All of the vegetation is pressed up to the house to leave patches of grass that requires daily watering.
The building stands two stories tall at about 25 feet. This height makes it difficult for trees to help shade and cool the building. At present, they save roughly 740.1 Kilowatt-hours and $267 per year. Obviously, this is better than the alternative of no savings or vegetation, but these savings could be greatly increased.
On top of the savings benefits, there are other ecosystem services that these trees provide. They currently intercept 20,102 gallons of stormwater per year and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) by 1,820 pounds.
One way to get more benefits is simply to add more trees. Trees with a lot of potential for height and a wide deciduous canopy are best because they shade a lot of sun in the summer, but lose their leaves during the winter to allow the sun to heat the building. With a two story building, it takes taller trees to shade the roof, but all trees are helpful regardless. If six large deciduous trees were added, the annual savings increase by $1,214. With the existing trees, they intercept 126,567 gallons of stormwater per year. They conserve 1,835.4 Kilowatt-hours of electricity and reduce consumption of heating fuel by (-38.5) therms. They also reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) by 6,613 pounds. The cost of trees is measly in consideration of all these benefits. Also, more trees adds to the aesthetic interest of the building’s landscape.
When looking to increase energy savings, solar panels are an even more effective method. In this case, they can easily be added to the South side of the building, but in order to do this, we can’t keep the large trees shading the roof. Although it initially sounds like a bad idea to take trees out of the plan, one solar panels is equivalent to 49 trees in regards to the carbon offset.
My recommendation is to add the solar panels, keep the existing small trees and even add more small trees. These small trees won’t interfere with the work of the solar panels and offer other ecosystem services like stormwater management and carbon offset. As far as making the space more livable, this space has a lot of potential. At the moment, the parking lot dominates the space. A better option might be to add a parking garage nearby and use all the extra space from the parking lot to become open green space for the apartment renters. This would add to the community aspect and encourage people to walk around more. It would also break up the monotony of the asphalt and improve the overall aesthetic.