Drylands, earth's largest terrestrial biome, remain poorly understood relative to more mesic systems, particularly in how we understand ecosystem responses to multiple, overlapping global change drivers. In the drylands of western North America, climate, land use, and human populations are changing quickly, often resulting in decreased ecosystem functioning. Predicting and mitigating the negative effects of global change remains a central challenge in ecology, and we are just beginning to understand how productivity and diversity in dryland systems respond to these multiple global change drivers. Research budgets and logistics often limit studies to focus on single global change drivers, but we must clearly address how these drivers interact across space and time. Recent advances in manipulative experiments and ecosystem modeling efforts in North American drylands have created a unique opportunity to test and revise existing theory across ecosystem types and global change drivers. Specifically, untangling responses and attributing specific mechanisms across these inherently stochastic systems may only be possible by synthesizing across ecological disciplines and approaches. As ecologists, we aim to place our theory squarely on a mechanistic understanding of our study systems, and creative synthesis across research efforts is our best hope at achieving this goal, especially among those with a robust working knowledge of their study systems. This session will bring together researchers with deep expertise in dryland biotic functioning and conduct research across spatial scales, ecosystems, and disciplines to advance our understanding of this large and misunderstood biome.