Changing environmental conditions, such as invasion from non-native plant species, and the increased frequency of extreme weather events, are resulting in rapid declines in the health and productivity of ecosystems worldwide. Resource poor landscapes, such as dryland systems that cover 80% of the world’s land surface, are especially vulnerable to these climatic changes. This is because in these habitats, only relatively small changes in the environment are required to produce large changes in native plant and soil communities. As a result, ecological restoration is becoming an increasingly critical component of efforts to limit the loss of biodiversity, stabilize sites after disturbances such as drought, and enhance productivity across dryland ecosystems. Unfortunately, the well documented failures of ecological restoration in dryland systems highlights the critical need for collaborative, innovative, and dynamic approaches to develop and transmit information on the most effective and resource-efficient approaches to restoring water-limited ecosystems. This symposium will provide an overview of research examples that attempt to identify novel approaches to dryland restoration. Research that demonstrates particular utility for dryland restoration has recently leveraged approaches and topics from many fields in ecology, including plant trait and climate matching, novel concepts associated with plant-herbivore interactions, and linking demographic theory with field application. As a result, symposium topics will be of interest to dryland applied ecologists, as well as to more general ecologists working external to arid land systems. Because dryland restoration can be such a contentious social topic, speakers will also describe successes and challenges to public engagement within the science and application of dryland restoration in an effort to better understand how human and ecological communities are responding to environmental stress.