CLLC Board and Staff Celebrate Tabor’s Extraordinary Legacy as a Global Conservation Leader
NEWS RELEASE
BOZEMAN, MT, July 1, 2025 — The Board of Directors of the Center for Large Landscape Conservation (CLLC) announced today that the organization’s visionary founder, Gary Tabor, will retire from his role as CEO of CLLC.
Mary Pearl, Chair of the CLLC Board of Directors, made the announcement: “Gary Tabor let the Board know of his plans to retire from his role as CEO after leading this organization since he founded it eighteen years ago in 2007. Through CLLC he developed an entirely new sector of conservation theory and practice, and all of us at CLLC are grateful to Gary for his leadership, drive and service. The Board will now begin the task of identifying his successor while we celebrate Gary’s contribution to our collective goals in large landscape conservation and ecological connectivity.”
Gary stated, “It has been the joy of my professional life to have founded CLLC, to have worked with such inspiring colleagues and to have built together the field of connectivity science. Starting with only two employees, CLLC currently employs around 25 dedicated conservation professionals and operates 10 networks of experts and institutions supporting more than 2,000 conservation practitioners around the world to connect habitat and protect species and ecological systems. CLLC is well positioned to continue to extend its influence and impact in the years ahead.”
With Tabor at the helm, CLLC helped craft national legislation on wildlife corridors and crossings, co-authored the first-ever international guidelines on ecological connectivity and created groundbreaking scientific tools for measuring and combating habitat fragmentation, among many other accomplishments. By any measure, Tabor has had an extraordinary career in a broad range of conservation science and practice, including co-authoring more than 100 scientific papers and reports. Not only a pioneer in connectivity science for the past 40 years, Tabor was also a leader in the field linking environmental change to human, wildlife and ecosystem health, Conservation Medicine and One Health.
After retiring as CEO of the Center, Tabor will continue as a professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University and adjunct professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. He also serves as Chair of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas’ Connectivity Conservation Specialist Group, which connects 1,300 scientists from 135 countries.
The Center for Large Landscape Conservation will welcome a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) as part of a thoughtfully planned transition from its founder. The firm DSG|Koya is leading an international search for an individual who will be able to build on Gary Tabor’s extraordinary legacy.
More information about the executive search is available on DSG|Koya’s website.
About the Center for Large Landscape Conservation
The Center for Large Landscape Conservation advances ecological connectivity for climate resilience worldwide through science, policy, practice, and collaboration. Largelandscapes.org
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For more information, contact:
Christine Weinheimer, Communications Manager
Center for Large Landscape Conservation
christine@largelandscapes.org
