The Community Terrestrial System Model (CTSM) is a comprehensive modeling framework that can be flexibly used as the land component in climate models, numerical weather prediction models, ecological models, and hydrologic prediction models for process-level understanding of land-atmosphere interactions. The recent community land model version 5 (CLM5) serves as a major tool to achieve our various research goals in the CREWSnet project. CLM5 contains many features relevant to our project research, including updated soil and plant hydrology, river modeling, carbon and nitrogen cycling and coupling, global crop model with six crop types and time-evolving irrigated areas and fertilization rates, transient land use data sets and increased flexibility to represent landscape dynamics through specified or prognostic transitions in land unit weights. These features/updates allow for more mechanistic treatment of key hydrologic and ecological processes and more comprehensive and explicit representation of anthropogenic land management.