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Rangelands of the western Great Plains of North America are complex social-ecological systems where management objectives for collaborative learning, livestock production and grassland bird habitat conservation converge.� This complexity requires collaboration among diverse disciplines to address social and ecological issues. This study synthesizes animal, wildlife and critical social science research conducted by graduate students and early career researchers on the Collaborative Adaptive Rangeland Management (CARM) experiment conducted at the USDA-ARS Central Plains Experimental Range, a Long-Term Agro-ecosystem Research (LTAR) network location. CARM is a 10-year collaborative adaptive management (CAM) project (initiated in 2012) where 11 stakeholders representing ranchers, state/federal land managers and conservation NGOs have worked with researchers in decision-making informed by extensive and spatiotemporally explicit ecological monitoring. Stakeholders manage a herd of yearling steers using pulse grazing on 2600 ha (10 paired 130 ha pastures) of shortgrass steppe for objectives related to 1) livestock production, 2) grassland bird habitat and 3) vegetation.� Here, we evaluate the efficacy of CARM, compared to traditional rangeland management (TRM, season-long grazing, mid-May to October at a moderate stocking rate) on a) influencing community stability, abundance and reproductive success of grassland birds; b) affecting diet quality, nutritional plane and energetic expenditure of yearlings during two grazing seasons; and c) promoting meaningful collaboration and inclusion of diverse knowledges. Our results indicate that 1) vegetation drives abundance and nest placement for grassland birds, but nest survival is more strongly influenced by weather than management 2) yearlings grazing in the TRM pastures had a consistently higher plane of nutrition through measured diet quality and 3) existing stakeholder systems of knowledge enhance adaptive decision-making and meaningful collaboration requires inclusion of stakeholders throughout the entire project design. These results suggest that iterative, stakeholder-focused CAM processes are enhanced by multidisciplinary research approaches that address multiple social-ecological management objectives on rangelands.