We Conserve Nature by Connecting People Across Cultures and Geographies

EIN: 27-1226829

501c3 nonprofit corporation

Bozeman, Montana

We conserve nature by connecting people across cultures and geographies.

What is the Center for Large Landscape Conservation?

We strategically connect ideas, individuals, and institutions to catalyze collaboration and amplify progress towards the imperative of our time: to conserve Earth’s resilient, vital large landscapes.

Since large landscape conservation involves great geographical scales and touches many lives, it requires a collaborative effort—not something one organization can fully shoulder alone. We see ourselves as the “hub” for large landscape conservation, connecting people, organizations and resources to foster powerful solutions that respect diverse shareholders.

Our Mission

We catalyze, advance, and support large landscape conservation by:

· building communities of invested stakeholders around large landscape issues,

· advancing science that informs critical decision-making, and

· advocating policies and strategies that champion ecological connectivity.

Our Vision

Our vision is a dynamic collaboration of ideas, institutions, and individuals that creates a network of connected natural areas resilient to large scale environmental challenges.

What is Large Landscape Conservation?

Working in partnership with local people and communities, large landscape conservation connects working lands, urban areas, and wild lands into whole, healthy landscapes that allow nature to flourish.

On the ground, large landscape conservation enhances the conservation value of working lands, helping conserve key connections between landscapes, launching climate adaptation initiatives, and other strategies to help nature remain resilient on a grand scale.

Our Work

We promote natural resiliency by answering to large landscape conservation’s biggest challenges: the need for deeper collaboration, supportive science and strong policy.

Build Communities That Engage Invested Stakeholders

The diverse challenges of conserving large landscapes merit an equally diverse response—a collaboration between organizations, communities, individuals and government. We see ourselves as the connective tissue of conservation, sparking dynamic conversations between stakeholders—a catalyst for widespread, positive progress across large landscapes.

People are integral to large landscapes—we believe the best solutions arise when those with different perspectives meet to find common ground and insight. To that end, we organize gatherings, facilitate conversations, and provide communications and educational resources to deepen understanding and cooperation between those who live, work and play on the landscape. We know challenges can unite people, so we help communities identify—and work to solve—shared initiatives.

No one organization can single-handedly address the large landscape challenges of climate and land use change, but by building communities of invested stakeholders around large landscape issues, we set the stage for collaboration—and solutions—on a grand scale.

Advance Science That Informs Conservation Decisions

We see science as a powerful diagnostic tool, one that can help us better discover and defend vital links between landscapes. Our work explores key landscape stressors, identifying places where maintaining connected landscapes is paramount—now and for the future. Equipped with a scientific perspective, we collaborate with partner organizations and practitioners to uphold these crucial connections.

We’re ever-vigilant for opportunities to merge science with large landscape goals, and we strive to make our scientific findings accessible, useful and relevant. We seek partner organizations who can benefit from our data and discoveries, supplying them with resources that amplify their on-the-ground efforts. We also look for gaps in knowledge, distilling our findings into useful tools to effectively inform decision-makers.

Perhaps most importantly, we look for shared values among stakeholders, directing our scientific inquiry towards solving common problems. Allied with partners from both inside and outside the conservation world, we advance connectivity goals together, supported by a scientific grounding.

Advocate Policy That Champions Ecological Connectivity

We lay the groundwork for a future of large connected natural areas—intact landscapes that support wildlife while offering all the benefits of nature to those who live, work, and play nearby. We advocate for policies, plans and strategies that champion large landscape conservation via federal, state and local initiatives.

Our goal is simple—to lend our policy expertise where it can best advance ecological connectivity. To that end, we create effective policies, strengthen existing ones, and refine those yet to be adopted. We encourage agencies and organizations to create wildlife-sensitive solutions within their priorities for management and practice, advising them in the process. As policy evolves, we help decision-makers and managers incorporate new requirements into their programs and on-the-ground work.

Transforming policy requires open collaboration—especially working on such a large scale. We unite diverse conservation organizations, leading a collective approach to advancing policy. Partnering with organizations, agencies, and visionary leaders, we’re ensuring healthy, intact landscapes for the future of both wildlife and people.

Case Studies

We look for opportunities to support and advance on the ground conservation challenges, gaining forward momentum with the help of our partners.

Build Communities

Engaging Major Stakeholders Across 18 Million Acres

We are proud to have coordinated one of the first large-scale climate adaptation efforts in North America, the Adaptive Management Initiative (AMI) of the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent. The AMI funded 45 climate adaptation projects throughout the Crown’s 22 million acres, allocating a total of $800,000. This suite of projects, selected by the Crown Roundtable review committee, was designed to engage a variety of stakeholders across the landscape and create collaboration among, tribes, First Nations, rural communities, non-profits, agencies, and faith leaders, all in an effort to build a more resilient, connected landscapes for both wildlife and people.

We facilitate wide-reaching networks by creating venues that invite deeper participation and increase our collective impact. We organize an annual conference, host workshops and webinars, and keep stakeholders updated with a monthly newsletter and conference calls. With our support, stakeholders share ideas and learn from each other to implement forward-thinking climate adaptation strategies. AMI participants are continuing to collaborate on initiatives strategically chosen for their potential to build resilience into the Crown’s natural and human communities.

While we consider participatory conservation on such a large scale a worthy achievement unto itself, we’re striving to make the AMI a model for finding solutions that can transfer to other landscapes—replicating successes around the Crown, the nation, and even the world. To that end, we are working on similar initiatives regionally with the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative. We’re also working through the Practioners Network to share ideas at a national scale.

Advance Science

Preserving Corridors While Protecting Drivers

Partnering with state agencies, we’ve integrated diverse data in novel ways, developing a clear picture of crucial zones in the Northern Rockies for both wildlife connectivity and human safety. By distilling wildlife corridor analyses, highway roadkill data, and road ecology principles, we’ve discovered where wildlife movement matters most, where human and wildlife safety are most at risk, and most importantly, where these two considerations overlap. Now, for the first time ever, practitioners on the ground will be able to rely on rigorous, science-based guidance as they advance strategies to safeguard wildlife movement across roadways.

Since wildlife crossing structures have been proven to reduce and even eliminate wildlife-vehicle collisions, our findings will inform progress that promotes connectivity for wildlife and protects drivers, too—helping conservation practitioners find important common ground with state transportation departments. We’ll translate our completed analysis into pragmatic resources, getting our findings into practitioners’ hands through action-oriented reports, workshops, and web-based decision-support tools.

Roads disrupt landscapes, and their impacts will only worsen as the West welcomes more people. By supporting practitioners’ on-the-ground actions with our big-picture perspective of connectivity, we can empower stakeholders to address existing roadway issues as well as inspire future transportation infrastructure that provides safe passage for wildlife and people. While our current efforts focus on the Northern Rockies, our approach can be applied across the entire West.

Already, we’re excited by the opportunities we see in our completed scientific work, and we’re dedicated to translating our findings into vital tools for groups on the ground, ushering in a future of connected landscapes and safer roadways in the Northern Rockies—and beyond.

Advocate Policy

Ensuring Connectivity for 193 Million Acres

Advocating for wildlife-friendly policy with our conservation partners, we secured a landmark advancement for large landscape conservation—by persuading the United States Forest Service (USFS) to incorporate wildlife corridors and ecological connectivity into its newly minted Forest Planning Rule. Now, as the USFS creates the next generation of land management plans for its 193 million acres, the agency must evaluate and provide protection standards for ecological connectivity and wildlife corridors to ensure the long-term integrity of our public lands.

We consider this a major victory for maintaining large connected natural areas across each of the 171 national forests and grasslands, as well as having the USFS consider its connections to neighboring wild areas. Still, it’s just the beginning, as this new national policy must now be translated into tangible local progress during the development of individual management plans. To that end, we have proposed changes to the USFS Manual and USFS Handbook, "how to" books that guide managers through day-to-day operations and planning. At the same time, we also are participating in local USFS management plan revisions to assist firsthand in the new policy’s implementation.

We’re thrilled to have helped get provisions for connectivity into the new Forest Planning Rule, and we’re committed to assuring the Forest Service converts this new direction into the protection of dozens, if not hundreds, of wildlife corridors across the nation over the next decade.

Staff Biographies

Dr. Gary Tabor, Executive Director

BSc Ecology, Cornell University

VMD Wildlife Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

MSc Conservation Biology, Yale University

Gary catalyzes progress in building a community that advances large landscape conservation. Gary is Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Large Landscape Conservation. Drawing on over 30 years' experience working on behalf of large scale conservation internationally in Africa, South America, Australia and Canada as well as 12 years as a leader within the U.S. environmental philanthropic community, Gary guides CLLC with a vision grounded in both science and practice.

A conservation scientist and wildlife veterinarian, Gary’s conservation achievements cross the globe, including the establishment of Kibale National Park in Uganda and pioneering the field of Conservation Medicine and Eco-Health. In the West, he co-designed the Western Governors’ Association Wildlife Corridors Initiative, and co-founded the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, the Roundtable of the Crown of the Continent, and the Practitioners’ Network for Large Landscape Conservation.

Gary has served as Program Officer of the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation, Associate Director of the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, and Yellowstone to Yukon Program Director for the Wilburforce Foundation. Sitting on multiple conservation boards, Gary is a Henry Luce Scholar and a 2013-2014 recipient of an Australian American Fulbright Scholar award in Climate Change and Clean Energy. As part of his Fulbright, Gary was appointed as Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Centre of Excellence in Environmental Decisions. He serves as one of four NGO leads on the joint US Canada Mexico Landscape Conservation Cooperation Council. Gary is incoming Vice Chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas' Connectivity Conservation Working Group.

Rob Ament, Senior Conservationist
BSc Horticulture, Iowa State University
MSc Biological Sciences, Montana State University

Rob leads our efforts in advancing wildlife corridors and ecological connectivity, drawing on over 30 years of experience in ecology, natural resource management, and environmental advocacy, He seeks to develop wildlife-friendly national, regional and state-based policies and test their effectiveness at the landscape level.

He is a founding board member of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, former board member of the Wildlands Network and served on two policy groups for the Western Governors’ Association’s Wildlife Corridors Initiative. He is an active member of IUCN’s International Connectivity Conservation Network where he is co-authoring a policy paper on connectivity conservation areas.

Complementing his work here at CLLC, Rob is also the Road Ecology Program Manager for the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University. He currently serves on the steering committee for the biennial International Conference on Ecology and was elected to MSU’s Campus Sustainability Advisory Council. As a road ecologist, he served as an expert panelist for a National Academies’ Transportation Research Board (TRB) synthesis on environmental monitoring and is on a standing TRB committee engaged in roadside management. He was an invited judge for the Federal Highway Administration’s 2013 national Environmental Excellence Awards.

To balance his professional endeavors he has served as a volunteer for such causes as wildlife rescue, child advocacy, women’s shelters and immigrant education. Like every good Montanan, he likes to get outdoors whenever it is sunny, cloudy, snowing or raining.

Melly Reuling, Senior Conservationist

BS Biology, Evergreen State College

MS Wildlife Ecology, University of Washington

Melly brings her Montana ranching roots and over two decades of conservation work with both government and non-government agencies in East Africa to her role at the Center for Large Landscape Conservation: building and strengthening collaborative communities around large landscape conservation issues.

Currently, Melly coordinates development of the GNLCC Connectivity Strategy, a regional multi-scale project to coordinate connectivity actions across the landscape. She is also helping build tribal Climate Adaptation Planning programs for the Blackfeet and CSKT through the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent. She serves on the Leadership Team of the Rocky Mountain Partner Forum of the GNLCC and helps coordinate stakeholders working to build drought resilience in the Upper Missouri Basin.

In the past, she’s worked on a wide variety of conservation projects concerned with wildlife movement, transboundary conservation issues and human wildlife conflict. She also helped develop community conservation protocol in both Kenya and Tanzania—experience that has informed her more recent work on connectivity, climate change, and drought resilience projects in Montana.

Meredith McClure, Conservation Scientist

PhD in Ecology with Graduate Certificate in Statistics, Montana State University

MA in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, UCLA

BS in Ecology, Evolution, & Behavior, University of Texas

Meredith helps our partner organizations and agencies focus their limited resources on conserving the region’s most crucial corridors, bringing a scientific perspective to our conservation work. Her scientific inquiry also helps to inform CLLC’s conservation policy and strategy work.

Currently, Meredith works jointly with CLLC and our partner organization, Conservation Science Partners. Her past and ongoing work has explored connectivity-related processes in diverse settings, including the nationwide spread of feral swine, puma movements in the Greater Grand Canyon, the transmission of Hendra virus among Australian flying foxes, and the impact of roads, land use, and climate change on Northern Rockies wildlife corridors.