Prairie Designs has installed its first scientific monitoring package at Fort Worth Country Day School in Fort Worth. Prairie Designs rents and installs these systems to provide data to clients without the expense of purchasing and maintaining their own monitoring package.

Fort Worth Country Day installed four proof-of-concept green roof modules in early 2010, and this monitoring package will be tracking on site rainfall and soil moisture in each of the four test modules. The Campbell Scientific Logger is solar powered, and has a battery backup capable of lasting for over a year. These systems are easily expandable to measure other parameters like stormwater flow, soil temperature, and solar heat gain.

Fort Worth Country Day will be tracking how the four different test modules store and use water over a full year, providing the greater Texas green roofing community with valuable data on what irrigation regimes might be necessary to sustain a living roof like theirs.