Green roofs have been established for over 100years and they have been become one of the key elements in urban area in the past few decades. Many scientific researches focus on its cooling performance, efficiency and survival rates of plants. This article provides an overview mainly from two aspects, the vegetation on the green roofs and its benefits toward the surrounding environments. Vegetation is the key element in installing green roofs. It also provides some factors in choosing suitable plants on rooftops, factors including species that are drought tolerant, solar radiation tolerant, and cooling ability of plants. In addition, green roofs play a critical role in improving the urban environment by enriching the biodiversity, delaying the storm peak to the drainage system, diminishing the runoff quantity, purifying the air pollutants as well as the runoff quality

Background: Nurturing students’ interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers is a major goal of STEM education. Although the relationship between students’ stereotypical beliefs regarding STEM careers and their career interest can be reasonably hypothesized, research investigating the extent to which and how students’ STEM career interest is directly or indirectly influenced by their stereotypical beliefs is lacking. This study investigated how upper primary students’ stereotypical beliefs regarding STEM careers predicted their STEM self-efficacy and STEM career-related outcome expectations and how these constructs predicted their STEM career interest. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse quantitative survey data of 824 fourth- to sixth-grade students and test the hypothesized models.Results: Students’ stereotypical beliefs regarding STEM careers negatively predicted their self-efficacy in STEM activities and career-related outcome expectations. Additionally, the students’ self-efficacy in STEM activities and career-related outcome expectations in turn predicted their STEM career interest.Conclusions: These results explain the potential indirect effect of STEM stereotypes on students’ career interest through self-efficacy and outcome expectations. The findings highlight the significant role of STEM stereotypes, self-efficacy in STEM activities, and career-related outcome expectations in students’ career development. The implications of this study for STEM education are also discussed.