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Energy budget of Amazonian forests has a large influence on regional and global climate, but relevant data are scarce. A novel energy partition method based on the maximum entropy production (MEP) theory is applied to simulate evapotranspiration in Amazonia. Using site‐level eddy flux data, the MEP method shows high skill at the hourly, daily, and monthly scales. Consistent performance under different levels of land surface dryness is revealed, hinting that drought signal is appropriately resolved. The site‐level MEP‐based estimates outperform the estimates of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer evapotranspiration product, which is commonly used for large‐scale assessments. At the Amazon basin scale, the two series yield similar averages but exhibit spatial differences. The parameter parsimony and demonstrated skill of the MEP method make it an attractive approach for environments with diverse strategies of water flux control.

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Vegetation processes are fundamentally limited by nutrient and water availability, the uptake of which is mediated by plant roots in terrestrial ecosystems. While tropical forests play a central role in global water, carbon, and nutrient cycling, we know very little about tradeoffs and synergies in root traits that respond to resource scarcity. Tropical trees face a unique set of resource limitations, with rock-derived nutrients and moisture seasonality governing many ecosystem functions, and nutrient versus water availability often separated spatially and temporally. Root traits that characterize biomass, depth distributions, production and phenology, morphology, physiology, chemistry, and symbiotic relationships can be predictive of plants’ capacities to access and acquire nutrients and water, with links to aboveground processes like transpiration, wood productivity, and leaf phenology. In this review, we identify an emerging trend in the literature that tropical fine root biomass and production in surface soils are greatest in infertile or sufficiently moist soils. We also identify interesting paradoxes in tropical forest root responses to changing resources that merit further exploration. For example, specific root length, which typically increases under resource scarcity to expand the volume of soil explored, instead can increase with greater base cation availability, both across natural tropical forest gradients and in fertilization experiments. Also, nutrient additions, rather than reducing mycorrhizal colonization of fine roots as might be expected, increased colonization rates under scenarios of water scarcity in some forests. Efforts to include fine root traits and functions in vegetation models have grown more sophisticated over time, yet there is a disconnect between the emphasis in models characterizing nutrient and water uptake rates and carbon costs versus the emphasis in field experiments on measuring root biomass, production, and morphology in response to changes in resource availability. Closer integration of field and modeling efforts could connect mechanistic investigation of fine-root dynamics to ecosystem-scale understanding of nutrient and water cycling, allowing us to better predict tropical forest-climate feedbacks.