Interactions between carbon, water and energy on land play key roles in the Earth System. The land surface community has long known the importance of key processes such as stomatal regulation, soil moisture, root water extraction, soil oxygen status, and vertical solute movement, all reflecting coupled carbon-water processes but new remote sensing measures provide a new scale of observation. This mini-symposium will present new theoretical, modeling and observational windows on how the planetary water, energy and carbon cycles connect in terrestrial systems.