Recreating Winchendon Village: A Distinct Destination in Toy Town (Winchendon, MA)

The goal of the Master of Regional Planning Studio is to develop a student’s techniques for collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing spatial and non-spatial data and then presenting that collective data in a manner (i.e., report, video, presentation, and charettes) that is understandable to academics, professionals, and the public. Planning Studio allows students to integrate knowledge from coursework and research, and apply such knowledge to resolving representative planning problems. At UMASS Amherst, these problems are found in neighborhood, rural, urban, and/or regional settings. In the fall of 2014, three local governments contracted with the MRP Studio to create separate vision plans that focused on key aspects of community revitalization. For the Town of Winchendon, the graduate student team (Carousel Consulting) created a revitalization plan that addressed declining investment and commercial activity in the Central Street corridor. As the “downtown” and commercial center of Winchendon, the strategy for Central Street focused on generating reinvestment through the advancement of commercial development and diversity, infill development and cohesion, place-making and branding, open space and recreation, and circulatory functionality

A multidisciplinary framework to assess the sustainability and acceptability of wildlife tourism operations

ABSTRACT Wildlife tourism is growing in popularity, diversity of target species, and type of tours. This presents difficulties for management policy that must balance the complex trade‐offs between conservation, animal welfare, and pragmatic concerns for tourist satisfaction and economic value. Here, we provide a widely applicable, multidisciplinary framework to assess the impacts of wildlife tourism focusing on industry tractability, socioeconomic values, and their effects on conservation, animal welfare, and ecosystem impacts. The framework accommodates and quantifies the complexity of factors influencing wildlife tourism management, including direct and indirect effects on target and nontarget species, and identifies priorities for future biological, socioeconomic, and cultural heritage research. When applied to white shark cage‐diving as a case study, the output demonstrates the utility of the framework for researchers, managers, and policy makers, and highlights the benefits of undertaking the assessment as an inclusive workshop to facilitate a more multidisciplinary assessment of wildlife tourism industries. The use of a universally applicable assessment framework will enable the identification of relevant factors to account for when managing wildlife tourism, provide an inventory of current knowledge, identify research needs, and semiquantitatively compare categories and target and nontarget species, leading to improved conservation outcomes for species and ecosystems

Future ocean climate homogenizes communities across habitats through diversity loss and rise of generalist species

Predictions of the effects of global change on ecological communities are largely based on single habitats. Yet in nature, habitats are interconnected through the exchange of energy and organisms, and the responses of local communities may not extend to emerging community networks (i.e., metacommunities). Using large mesocosms and meiofauna communities as a model system, we investigated the interactive effects of ocean warming and acidification on the structure of marine metacommunities from three shallow‐water habitats: sandy soft‐bottoms, marine vegetation, and rocky reef substrates. Primary producers and detritus—key food sources for meiofauna—increased in biomass under the combined effect of temperature and acidification. The enhanced bottom‐up forcing boosted nematode densities but impoverished the functional and trophic diversity of nematode metacommunities. The combined climate stressors further homogenized meiofauna communities across habitats. Under present‐day conditions metacommunities were structured by habitat type, but under future conditions they showed an unstructured random pattern with fast‐growing generalist species dominating the communities of all habitats. Homogenization was likely driven by local species extinctions, reducing interspecific competition that otherwise could have prevented single species from dominating multiple niches. Our findings reveal that climate change may simplify metacommunity structure and prompt biodiversity loss, which may affect the biological organization and resilience of marine communities