FIGURE 6.

Conceptual diagram showing the complexity of vegetation–soil water dynamics viewed in the dimensionality–nonlinearity plane. The red dashed box shows the near‐term research direction for inferring belowground dynamics enabled by new observations of VWC from remote sensing. A diurnal hysteresis between VWC and soil water cannot be captured with traditional ecohydrological models that consider a single land surface water pool (n=1) and can only be explained with a two (or greater) pool framework (n≥2), which further allows for inference of vegetation water uptake based on the timing and magnitude of the hysteresis. Figure adapted from Strogatz (2015)