As land use leaves massive tracts of land vacant for recovery, restoration must undergo a substantial shift to incorporate a complexity perspective beyond the traditional community, biodiversity or functional views. With an interaction–function perspective, we may be able to achieve ecosystems with better chances to adapt to current environmental changes and, especially, to climate change. We explore combined approaches that include still unused and underexplored techniques that will soon go mainstream and produce massive amounts of information to address the complexity gap. As we understand how complexity reassembles after the end of agriculture, we will be able to design actions to restore or enhance it at unprecedented spatial scales while increasing its adaptability to environmental changes. Moreno and Bhatnagar argue in favor of using an ‘interaction–function’ perspective to understand the dynamics of ecosystem recovery after land-use change, especially in the light of climate change.