Piper Shores is a nonprofit senior living community located in Scarborough, Maine. The 138-acre campus includes a variety of landscapes ranging from manicured lawns and gardens to stormwater swales and a vast conservation easement that protects forests, wetlands and meadows. This mosaic of outdoor environments elevates the quality of life for residents by providing scenic quality and by leveraging the restorative quality of the natural environment.

In 2024, Tandem completed a Landscape Management Plan to guide the next 10-years of maintenance, adaptation, and stewardship of the campus. In particular, Piper Shores’ leadership and residents sought opportunities to implement management practices that would improve the ecological health and climate resilience of the place. To meet these goals and generate a transformative vision, Tandem led a year-long process of in-depth site analysis, community engagement, and research into best practices for landscape planning, construction, and maintenance.

The plan includes recommendations regarding management practices, changes to the physical landscape, and suggested decision-making processes. Some recommendations represent small, incremental changes to current practices and conditions, while others advocate for extensive overhauls and adaptation. Across all the recommendations, an emphasis is placed on shifting from resource-intensive methods toward lower-maintenance and ecologically based practices. In addition to enhancing the campus's ecological health, this realignment will enable Piper Shores to reallocate budgets from routine maintenance toward investment in transformative capital projects. To ensure its success, the plan includes strategic and tactical recommendations for implementing the recommendations.