Over the last ten years, ecologists have explored ways to incorporate community assembly into restoration efforts. The assembly framework incorporates an understanding that communities are shaped by both stochastic and deterministic processes. It recognizes that extant communities are often shaped by historical events that can no longer be observed. These historical contingencies can lead to alternative states, depending on the environmental conditions and propagules present throughout the community’s development. Many processes can shape these alternative states and have importance for restoring and managing native communities. Disturbance and dispersal events may be important for regulating community initiation, whereas biotic interactions, such as facilitation, competition, and predation, can alter communities shortly after their initial establishment. Biotic and abiotic resources alter the membership of a community throughout its establishment. These processes interact to determine alternative trajectories and endpoints. For example, species that arrive early in community development can have a priority effect within a community and may facilitate or inhibit the future recruitment of later arriving species depending on biotic and abiotic resources. In the context of restoration, determining the underlying mechanisms that are responsible for driving communities along alternative trajectories will allow practitioners to dictate community development to the desired state. In order to further this field and provide useful tools for practitioners, we think it is necessary to periodically synthesize advances in this area. This organized oral session will focus on ecological research that incorporates various facets of community assembly and their relevance to restoration ecology. Invited speakers will discuss restored wetlands, grasslands, savannahs, and aquatic communities. The studies will be empirical and theoretical and will address a variety of taxa including plants and mycorrhizal fungi. We hope that the session will provide a summary of some of the current activity in this field and stimulate the discussion of future directions.