Our planet’s biodiversity is under great threat, and habitat loss is generally considered the greatest single cause. The Green Futures Lab innovates strategies for creating quality habitat, particularly within urban environments where it is most limited.
Metabolic Matters
What is biochar and how can it help designers address the unique challenges of urban landscapes as well as regional and global issues such as biodiversity loss and climate change? How can designers use the concept of metabolism to cultivate systems of biological, cultural and economic function that lead towards climate stability and resilient systems...
Climate Responsible City
With cities consuming significantly more energy and producing more greenhouse gas emissions, cities, and urban areas more broadly are critical in mitigating, or reducing the severity of, global climate change. For instance, how do we get to the places we need to go? What volume of GHG emissions are produced by city services like providing...
Sweetgrass Living Shorelines Project
Project Background The Sweetgrass Living Shorelines project examined the benefit of constructed floating wetlands to provide missing habitat on urbanized shorelines for outmigrating juvenile salmon in the freshwater Lake Washington Basin. This project built on the lessons learned from the Duwamish Floating Wetlands, testing new living shoreline prototypes. The GFL convened an expert Urban Shores...
Marine Floating Wetlands
Project Background To test the viability of floating wetlands in marine waters, the GFL and EarthCorps have installed customized BioMatrix eco-islands along a dock at Shilshole Bay Marina. The living shoreline units are again aimed at providing missing habitat for fish and to begin to restore wetland functions along urbanized shorelines where traditional restoration is...
Duwamish Floating Wetlands
Project Background The lower Duwamish River and transition zone (River miles 1-10) is critical to salmon population survival and return because this is where juvenile salmon forage, shelter and physiologically transition from living in freshwater to saltwater (Ostergaard, 2014). In order for out-migrating juveniles to achieve this transition they require low gradient intertidal mudflats lined...
Tradition Plateau & Tiger Mountain
Opportunities for the Gateway to the Greenway and Precedents: Inspiration for Nature Education and Play Ilsa Barrett, MLA ’20 + Lauren Iversen, MLA ’20 Situated to the south of Interstate 90, twenty miles east of Seattle, is Tiger Mountain. Darkly forested, the rising mountains frame the town of Issaquah, representative of the vast forests that...
Green Roof Database and Evaluation
Green Roof Survey: The 2010 Seattle Green Roof Survey provided a snapshot of green roofs for the City of Seattle creating a baseline understanding from which to build a more comprehensive inventory and tracking tool for the city’s green roof built stock, green roof benefits and challenges, and the emerging green roof industry. Information about...
Floating Wetlands Research & Education
In 2013 and again in 2017 and 2018, the Green Futures Lab conducted seminars on floating wetlands. Students surveyed floating wetlands literature and precedents, investigated their benefits for habitat, stormwater cleansing and water temperature regulation, and then developed new design concepts for several freshwater locations. Each site’s biological parameters drove the designs. Carrying the momentum...
Biodiversity Green Wall System
Spearheaded and designed by the Green Futures Lab, the UW Biodiversity Green Wall, Edible Green Screen, and Water Harvesting System was completed in the fall of 2012, transforming two blank concrete walls into lush urban habitat. Located in the southeast corner of Gould Hall on 15th Avenue and NE 40th Street, the award-winning project has...
Reflections: People on the Waterfront
In an ideal world, waterfronts would be available to all people. In most U.S. cities these prime sites are in private or industrial hands. Seattle has over 200 miles of shoreline, most of it inaccessible to the general public. The healing power of shorelines, water access and views are available only to the privileged. Reflections:...
Lake Forest Park 100-year Legacy Plan
As a member of a professional consulting team, the Green Futures Lab led the public process for developing a 100-year green infrastructure plan for the community of Lake Forest Park. The Lab facilitated a Green infrastructure festival to solicit community input, a Green Legacy design charrette to engage the public in planning their green infrastructure...
Open Space Seattle 2100
This collaborative project asked leaders from civic, environmental, business and community groups to create a comprehensive open space vision to guide Seattle’s urban development over the next 100 years. The urban watershed-based process included a city-wide design charrette with 23 teams led by local professionals and UW students. The 200-page final report documented visions and...
Regional Open Space Strategy (ROSS)
The Puget Sound basin is facing significant ecological and economic pressures, which are predicted to be further exacerbated by our rapid population growth and increasing intensity of climate change impacts. These stresses affect water quality and supply, fish, farm and forest production, flood and other environmental hazard vulnerability, economic opportunities and quality of life, and...
