The Stone Living Lab is a broad partnership that conducts transformative research and outreach to help make vulnerable coastal ecosystems and communities adaptive to climate change while enhancing natural and built environments. Located in the Boston Harbor, an urban estuarine ecosystem whose watershed is home to nearly 2 million residents, the Stone Living Lab aims to be adaptive, diverse, and boundary spanning, thus fundamentally embracing a nature-based approach. With support from the Stone Foundation, a team with expertise in intertidal/subtidal biology, biogeochemistry, coastal geomorphology, engineering, modeling, policy, and community science is working together with a wide variety of stakeholders to develop a multi-scalar observatory to study coastal resilience in urban coastal environments. We are working with developers, city and state agencies, and local communities that are in various stages of developing and constructing nature-based solutions to coastal hazards to design and assess past, present, and future approaches. This presentation will focus on the adaptive nature of the Lab as well as some of the successes and failures.