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We partner with stakeholders to study the effectiveness of adaptive management for social and ecological goals. We integrate social and ecological disciplines to 1) examine on-ranch grazing strategies, factors driving adoption of strategies, and outcomes; and 2) develop novel stakeholder participatory, adaptive management scale grazing experiments. We analyzed mail survey responses from 765 CA and WY ranchers to quantify on-ranch grazing strategies. We found 62% and 5% of ranchers surveyed implement extensive and intensive rotational strategies, respectively. Ranchers most likely to adopt intensive rotational grazing did not list livestock production as a primary goal, while ranchers adopting season-long continuous grazing ranked livestock production as their dominant goal. At an academic research and extension center in CA, we also engaged 58 diverse stakeholders to develop and implement a novel adaptive grazing study based on the goals and strategies they prescribed for testing. Stakeholders included ranchers running a livestock economic enterprise, conservation professionals who use grazing to pursue environmental goals, and professional rangeland managers who serve clientele with diverse goals. The strategies that stakeholders wanted to compare included season-long continuous, as well as extensive and intensive rotational grazing. Despite limited reports of on-ranch intensive rotational grazing by survey respondents, this diverse stakeholder advisory group overwhelmingly recommended intensive rotational grazing as a primary treatment of interest. Grazing management implementation and adaptation decisions are made jointly with our stakeholder advisory group in response to measured progress towards established goals and our collective experiential and experimental knowledge. We will highlight measured ecosystem service tradeoffs and synergies between grazing strategies, as well as the benefits and challenges of this "bottom-up" network approach to conducting linked social-economic-ecological research at the management scale.