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Global demand for vegetable oil and high oil palm yield have driven the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in tropical countries. The research literature widely recognizes the effects of forest cover conversion into oil palm on biodiversity, deforestation, and carbon dynamics. However, research on the ecohydrological impacts of oil palm plantations is sparse, despite studies indicating that oil palm development may reshape land-water interactions and the availability and movement of water at different spatial and temporal scales. We address this gap by conducting a systematic literature review on oil palm development and its relation to ecohydrological processes. We found 139 relevant papers up to the year 2021, addressing different ecohydrological processes related to oil palm. We reviewed their spatiotemporal scales, geographic distribution, oil palm species and age, and the effects of land conversion from forest, cropland, and pastures. We also incorporated societal aspects regarding community perceptions of water. Our review highlights the effects of oil palm plantations on three main components of the water cycle: (i) land-atmosphere, (ii) fluvial systems, and (iii) soils and groundwater. Most studies include analyses of the Indo-Malayan and Australasian biogeographical regions (113), followed by the Neotropics (49) and the Afrotropics (15). Compared to rainforests, oil palm monocultures are warmer and drier. They have higher evapotranspiration (ET) rates, lower runoff regulation and infiltration capacity, and lower soil organic carbon (SOC). Although less often implemented, alternative oil palm management practices, including oil palm agroforestry, can help to mitigate some of these effects. Forest to oil palm conversion is the most studied land transition, while conversions from croplands, pastures, and grasslands are less studied. Overall, we identify gaps in understanding the long-term effects of management on ecohydrological processes under different land conversions, especially in the Neotropics and the Afrotropics, precluding research-informed policy to manage impacts of this expanding crop.

Rubber plantations are an economically viable land-use type that occupies large swathes of land in Southeast Asia that have undergone conversion from native forest to intensive plantation forestry. Such land-use change has a strong impact on carbon, energy, and water fluxes in ecosystems, and uncertainties exist in the modeling of future land-use change impacts on these fluxes due to the scarcity of measured data and poor representation of key biogeochemical processes. In this current modeling effort, we utilized the Community Land Model Version 5 (CLM5) to simulate a rubber plant functional type (PFT) by comparing the baseline parameter values of tropical evergreen PFT and tropical deciduous PFT with a newly developed rubber PFT (focused on the parameterization and modification of phenology and allocation processes) based on site-level observations of a rubber clone in Indonesia. We found that the baseline tropical evergreen and baseline tropical deciduous functions and parameterizations in CLM5 poorly simulate the leaf area index, carbon dynamics, and water fluxes of rubber plantations. The newly developed rubber PFT and parametrizations (CLM-rubber) showed that daylength could be used as a universal trigger for defoliation and refoliation of rubber plantations. CLM-rubber was able to predict seasonal patterns of latex yield reasonably well, despite highly variable tapping periods across Southeast Asia. Further, model comparisons indicated that CLM-rubber can simulate carbon and energy fluxes similar to the existing rubber model simulations available in the literature. Our modeling results indicate that CLM-rubber can be applied in Southeast Asia to examine variations in carbon and water fluxes for rubber plantations and assess how rubber-related land-use changes in the tropics feedback to climate through carbon and water cycling.