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Collaborative Adaptive Landscape Management (CALM) has been promoted as the new paradigm for responding to change and unpredictability in complex, dynamic social-ecological systems. While the need for CALM is widely accepted, successful examples of how to integrate diverse knowledge sources and apply knowledge in an adaptive management framework lags behind. Learning from the Land, an interdisciplinary, participatory research and outreach project in northwestern Colorado and Thunder Basin, Wyoming, engages a variety of stakeholders in an adaptive management process to develop and refine state-and-transition models (STMs) that can be used to guide future management actions, and to increase understanding of the interaction of management, climate, and disturbances on transitions within and across ecological sites. We engage ranchers, agency land managers, Extension personnel and others via workshops and meetings throughout the research process. Engaging participants early and consistently has enabled us to test innovative, manager-identified hypotheses and gain crucial insights into fine-scale landscape history. Managers have provided land, equipment, and practical skills that have made management-relevant experiments possible. However, the time and effort required to cultivate stakeholder relationships currently limits the needed expansion from Collaborative Adaptive Management (CAM) to CALM. Further, successful collaboration with stakeholders requires that researchers share ownership of the research process. Researchers must work to make the process transparent and iteratively share results with stakeholders at an early stage of analysis, rather than waiting until all analyses are finalized. This is key to fostering stakeholder participation and input. Though not without challenges, Learning from the Land illustrates a process built upon genuine collaboration among managers and researchers, in order to increase the understanding of complex social-ecological systems, and make direct links between scientific research and action on the ground.