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Abstract

Hydrology has been a subject of great relevance for human development, and its main object of study — the water — demands practical and short-term solutions to meet society's needs. One of the strongest foundations of hydrology is in hydraulics, where the conditions of laboratory experiments are highly controlled and robust equations are derived. These circumstances have contributed and influenced to the establishment of empirical relationships between the movement of water through landscapes and the conservation of mass law in catchments. However, analyses have revealed that some of the empirical relationships in catchments might also reflect a potential ecosystem's coevolution with climate, pushing catchments to optimise their supply and demand limits. This agrees with the eco-evolutionary optimality principles used in vegetation modelling. These principles are based on the hypothesis such as that canopy conductance acclimates to environmental variations on different temporal scales by balancing the costs of carbon assimilation and maintenance of transpiration rates. Here, we navigate through some established findings in hydrology that are still widely discussed. We also show the results of interfaces between simple models and approaches based on optimality and hydrology. Our examples are based on the application of the P-model and SPLASH, both calibration-free models that use remote sensing data. P-model is a vegetation model that uses the least-cost and coordination hypotheses to quantify gross primary productivity, which is then used to estimate transpiration. SPLASH is a parsimonious, multi-purpose set of algorithms designed for eco-hydrological applications, which include some principles from TOPMODEL for runoff partitioning.