Humanity faces the grand challenge of meeting rising demands for agricultural commodities and water, despite growing pressures from climate extremes and constraints on water availability. Meeting this grand challenge will undoubtedly require “bridging communities and ecosystems” and success will be dependent on the inclusion of diverse viewpoints and multi-disciplinary collaboration. Emerging innovations in cropping systems and water management have high potential to meet this challenge – i.e., enhancing both agricultural production of food and renewable energy and water-related services. However, these potential innovations have inherent uncertainty regarding the consequences on the coupling between ecosystem function and local and regional biogeochemistry. Ecosystems are intricately linked with cycling of carbon, water, and greenhouse gases and have a strong influence on the surface energy budget. Any large-scale transition of a landscape from current practices to an ecosystem providing renewable energy is likely to perturb local biogeochemistry and climate which can lead to feedbacks at the landscape scale. Moreover, because many US state governments are setting targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that include land management options, it is imperative that those options are science-informed with recent state-of-the-art knowledge and methods. In this oral session, we bring together speakers from diverse scientific, ethnic, and gender backgrounds who focus on integrating ecosystem-scale measurements and models with critical issues related to altering the landscape to meet demands for renewable energy. The speakers will address the current state of knowledge related to key innovative strategies for land use and the impact of these strategies on biogeochemistry, feedbacks with existing ecosystems, and linkages with issues of larger ecological importance such as hydrological cycling, water quality, and greenhouse gas emissions.