Applied habitat and wildlife management regularly requires collaboration between disparate stakeholders, and, often, across a patchwork of land types and land owners. These dynamics cultivate an emerging social-ecological system in restoration design, implementation, assessment, success, and policy. However, because the achievement of management goals depends on interactions both within and across human and natural systems, and requires the participation of individuals across a range of disciplines, there is a danger that restoration design and implementation may neglect the social-ecological background for purposes of logistical and monetary feasibility. If effective restoration and conservation programs are to be developed and widely deployed, then researchers need to consider how biological processes, the ability to forecast successional change, and socio-ecological systems interact to determine management outcomes. The dynamic group of symposium speakers will explore the close linkages among our understanding of restoration ecology, the ability to predict ecological change, and the economic and sociological implications of management outcome uncertainty. From this synthetic effort we will explore opportunities in both private and public land management scenarios to improve our ability to forecast manage practice outcomes and overcome sociological and economic adoption barriers that currently constrain management intervention efforts. Symposium topics span a variety of systems and themes, ensuring widespread appeal. Furthermore, speakers demonstrate an impressive diversity in affiliation type and career level, enhancing opportunities for discussion across an array of perspectives. Some of the topics to be covered in the symposium include: How the attitudes of restoration practitioners and conservationists may be inconsistent with respect to cultural and non-cultural habitat and wildlife use; Using socio-ecological techniques to move the field of restoration beyond conceptual frameworks to allow stakeholders to forecast intervention outcomes within reasonable bounds of uncertainty; The contribution of landscape legacies, stakeholder perception and stakeholder behavior to restoration success; Novel frameworks in which to integrate ecological and human-systems factors into restoration decision making; and Descriptions of the Social-Ecological Systems Framework (SESF) in action. This symposium will provide a novel opportunity for meeting attendees who are characterized by a wide range of research interests to learn about and discuss inter-disciplinary ideas.