Dictionary

megashed en · NOUN

Etymology

From mega- + shed.

Meanings

1. A massive store, warehouse, or distribution center, especially one with a plain or unattractive exterior.
   • Outside the business pages, it will probably be Tesco the bulldozer that makes headlines, as it is lambasted for supposedly demolishing traditional high streets and replacing small shops with its category-killing megasheds. 2006 April 21, George MacDonald, “Tesco needs to spread word of its good work”, in Retail Week:
   • Here, theboxtank (Emily Andersen, Geoff DeOld and Corey Hoelker), a collaborative blog about big-box urbanism and retail, considers the latent architectural possibilities of the now global phenomenon of space enclosing industrially clad megasheds - the potential of which was never underestimated by Cedric Price or Martin Pawley. 2006, Ian Abley, Jonathan Schwinge, Manmade Modular Megastructures, →ISBN, page 96:
   • What do we feel when we see the marching lines of pylons, the rising telecommunications masts, the slow-moving rotors of wind generators, the proliferation of huge, windowless plastic-coated distribution megasheds that are redescribing our chosen homeland? 2007, Sefryn Penrose, Images of Change: An Archaeology of England's Contemporary Landscape:
   • Anthony Gormley, one of the few people to squeeze any aesthetic interest out of the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal, has called megasheds 'the most permanent unconscious memorial to the age of mobility' and said they are 'as much a part of our history as the rural barn'. 2010, Joe Moran, On Roads: A Hidden History, →ISBN, page 151:
2. An extremely large watershed.
   • Because of differences between the two models in the amount of forest land in each megashed, we utilized the percentage of acres clearcut each period in a megashed from the WORTS analyses. 2004, Thomas A Spies, Darius M. Adams, Mark E. Harmon, K. Norman Johnson, Gordon H. Reeves, Final Report To National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry: Project A5: Assess the Scientific Basis for Standards/Practices at the Stand, Management Unit, Landscape and Regional Level: Oregon Coast Range:
   • The Umpqua Basin was selected as a result of subdividing the Coast Range into six megasheds (watersheds of 1-2 million acres each), the largest areas that could be modeled given the computer hardware (2 gigabytes of RAM) available at the time. 2000, Lael M. Rogan, Combining the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to assess current and future recreation conditions in Oregon's coast range:
   • How has ramping up to the scale of whole watersheds, and so-called megasheds, affected the way scientists think about and execute their crucial experimental work? 2004, Sally Duncan, Technology and meaning in natural resource management: the story-making role of GIS in the CLAMS project:

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