Biodiversity loss continues to accelerate despite growing scientific knowledge and the surge of multilateral initiatives such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This paradox reveals the widening gap between research and on-the-ground conservation. Here, I trace a personal scientific journey from question-driven ecology toward problem-driven conservation, using tropical dry forests (TDF) in Colombia as a case study in one of the most threatened ecosystems on Earth. Despite harboring exceptional biodiversity and supporting millions of people, these ecosystems are characterized by high levels of poverty, food insecurity and desertification. Consequently, tailoring restoration actions that also address food sovereignty is both urgent and critical.

First, I reflect on the key challenges we have encountered in translating ecological knowledge into restoration practice in TDFs. While researchers have made substantial progress in understanding successional dynamics, critical bottlenecks along the restoration pipeline remain unresolved. Among the most persistent ones, we need to expand beyond the narrow set of commonly used plants by identifying and propagating suitable species for the drylands. However, no matter how well we resolve the ecological bottlenecks, nursery practitioners remain a forgotten link in the restoration chain. Restoration will only succeed and scale-up when researchers, practitioners, and local communities jointly shape the process from the start.

Such collective action becomes even more urgent when we consider that food systems embedded in TDF landscapes are under mounting pressure from agrobiodiversity loss. I then discuss how transformative change— that is, fundamental, system-wide shifts in how we think, organize, and act —requires going beyond ecological knowledge to genuinely engage people. Drawing on work in Montes de María, a subregion of the Colombian Caribbean marked by violence and armed conflict, I present the concept of “culinary ecosystems” an integrative framework connecting agrobiodiversity, food practices, biocultural heritage, and local livelihoods. I show that higher biodiversity associated with cassava cultivation in local farms is tightly linked to richer diets, and reflects communities actively maintaining and adapting their food systems through memory, biodiversity management, and collective practices. Overall, these bottom-up initiatives illustrate that transformative change for biodiversity conservation cannot be purely academic. Transdisciplinary work is critical, as the most durable solutions emerge when people see themselves as protagonists of the socioecological restoration of their own territories.