Evolving Frameworks Towards Identifying Challenges and Opportunities of Indoor Vegetation Systems

Our planet is rapidly urbanizing, leading to significant biodiversity loss. In architecture and urban planning, public and private developers are beginning to integrate vegetation into built environments such as green roofs, urban farms, and bioremediation systems, in some cases designed as novel additions to mechanical systems. In indoor environments, investigations into active biofilters for improving Indoor Air Quality have been investigated for several decades. As much of this research remains in disparate fields of inquiry and examines specific aspects of the indoor ecosystem, there are still many gaps in the knowledge, leaving building design professionals without comprehensive or standard frameworks to make actionable decisions on their anticipated performance. The value of such bioremediation systems, as well as the reliability of the evidence at the scale necessary to advocate for them, has often been obfuscated by the extrapolation of chamber-scale results with narrow scopes to the more complex contextual factors present with whole building matrix behaviors. To establish more systematic frameworks for evaluating building-integrated bioremediation and vegetation systems, shifting towards more comprehensive Indoor Environmental Quality metrics suggests a broader, more inclusive range of evaluative criteria at scale, towards multivalent value propositions. In addition to airborne pollutant removal rates, the impact of vegetation systems on a range of factors such as acoustic and thermal performance, allows for a more pragmatic and comprehensive assessment of value. Additional methods of evaluation including life-cycle analysis (energy, water, material use), potential health benefits (diverse microbiome, biophilia, etc), and other stakeholder frameworks (ecosystem services, etc) or value systems could offer more holistic performance metrics through which to evaluate systems. Evolving frameworks capable of integrating disparate metrics are necessary to (1) direct fundamental research towards more applicable experimental reporting values, and (2) provide accessible frameworks for decision makers when considering indoor vegetation systems.