Our Water is a policy and design advocacy process for projecting green infrastructure performance for large scale projects, in order to prevent localized flooding, using GIS data. The process leverages statistical methods from demography and ecology to summarize building typologies, which then informs the total area of building rooftops in a fixed geography that are potentially suitable for supporting green infrastructure. This area is then interpreted through performance metrics per square foot, based on studies performed by OMNI ecosystems on their proprietary green roof media. This ultimately produces a total number of gallons of water that a region is capable of retaining in various rain events if they adopted this green infrastructure initiative.
Our Water is rooted in the scientific method of observation based data, which is then extrapolated using statistics. Much like a political survey is used to summarize populations, Our Water’s workflow summarizes buildings based on sample observations. This method can be applied to other such studies of solar panel performance or other green infrastructure adoption. This process, while not automated, is easily replicated by anyone with minimal ESRI ArcMap experience and moderate skills in Microsoft Excel.
