The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, the largest wetland restoration project on the West Coast of the U.S., will begin restoring more than 15,000 acres of former salt ponds in the south San Francisco Bay in 2008. The restoration goals are to provide a mix of habitats for South Bay species, ensure flood protection, and offer a range of wildlife-oriented public access. Restoration and management actions will be phased over approximately 50 years. The Project has identified a number of key uncertainties, both scientific and social, that may be barriers to achieving its goals. Uncertainties are primarily due to gaps in ecological knowledge and inadequate tools for predicting change. To deal with uncertainty, the Project developed a science-based adaptive management approach using research, monitoring and modeling to provide timely and useful information that Project managers will use in decision-making. This session will describe the Project’s adaptive management approach and highlight research-derived information needed by the Project. The session begins with a summary of the Project’s adaptive management plan, which is based on: 1) quantitative restoration targets, monitoring to assess progress, and applied studies/modeling to reduce uncertainty, and 2) the use of Project information to generate management responses. Further presentations address particular studies supporting the adaptive management framework, addressing key uncertainties such as sediment supply and dynamics, bird use of changing habitats, and climate change effects. Finally, the session will include description of numerical models developed to synthesize data across disciplines to increase predictive power.