Andrew B. Taber

Executive Vice President of Programs, Wildlife Trust

As Executive Vice President of Programs at Wildlife Trust, Andrew Taber is charged with advancing the work of the Wildlife Trust Alliance. Taber also oversees Wildlife Trust's ongoing programs in Conservation Medicine, the New York Bioscape Initiative and the Edge of the Sea Aquatic Conservation Program.

Taber, the son of a US Foreign Service China specialist, was born and raised in Asia and Europe. He received his Bachelor's Degree in 1978 in Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduating, Taber spent three years doing fieldwork in Alaska on a range of species including monitoring the Bowhead whale population with the Inupiat Indians.

Andrew then traveled to the UK to complete a doctorate in zoology at Oxford, under the tutelage of Professor David Macdonald. The study took Taber to Argentina to study the mara, or Patagonian cavy, which began what was to become a 25-year focus on Latin America. In 1987 he moved to Paraguay to initiate the first intensive field study on the Chacoan peccary, and develop the first action plan for the conservation of this endangered species. He drew attention to the biodiversity and protection needs of the Gran Chaco, a region that had been largely ignored by conservationists.

In the early 1990s Taber moved to Bolivia where he worked as the country coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The broad conservation and research program he developed included field research projects on white-lipped peccaries, brocket deer, tapirs, Andean deer, jaguars and giant otters. His most significant contribution was forging an alliance between Isoceno Indians, other tribes, and the Bolivian Government that led to the establishment in 1995 of the Gran Chaco National Park - one of the western hemisphere's largest protected areas.

In 1998 Taber moved to New York City to become director of WCS's Latin American Program, overseeing more than 70 conservation projects in 17 countries in Latin America. As director, he led the launch of several major new initiatives for landscape-scale conservation from Guatemala to southern Argentina, and nurtured marine conservation programs in the southwest Atlantic. From 2003 to 2004, Taber designed and initiated a major program to conserve over 220,000 square kilometers in seven wild landscapes across the greater Amazon basin.