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Success rates reseeding native species on degraded sagebrush-steppe may be near 10%. Nonetheless, land managers annually spend millions attempting to reestablish sagebrush-steppe plant communities to protect watershed health, reduce wildfire risk, provide livestock forage and recover critical species habitat. Until recently, restoration of sagebrush-steppe has largely adhered to traditional agronomic principles, focusing on changes to plant materials and farming technologies despite repeated failure. While these efforts have advanced our ability to restore native plant communities, we suggest that melding an understanding of underlying ecological barriers to native seedling survival with innovative technologies represents a transformative opportunity for sagebrush-steppe ecosystem conservation. Recent seed population demography research shows that seedling emergence may be a critical limiting bottleneck. Barriers to seedling survival during emergence are numerous and often spatially and temporally heterogeneous. However, identification of ecological barriers empowers development of engineering and management solutions tailored to overcome predictable obstacles to emergence. A partnership between ecologists with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service, The Nature Conservancy, and agri-business envisions a new approach to sagebrush-steppe restoration that emulates “precision agriculture” by melding spatial predictions of ecological barriers to seedling survival, principles of plant ecology, and innovative seed enhancement technologies.