The increasing demand of adaptive management of land, forest, and water resources under the background of global change and water resources crisis has promoted the comprehensive study of coupling ecosystem water and carbon cycles and their restrictive relations. To construct the water-carbon coupling model and to approach the ecosystem water-carbon balance and its interactive response mechanisms under climate change at multiple spatiotemporal scales is nowadays a major concern. After reviewing the coupling relationships of water and carbon at various scales, this paper explored the implications and estimation methods of the key processes and related parameters of water-carbon coupling, the construction of evapotranspiration model at large scale based on RS, and the importance of this model in water-carbon coupling researches. The applications of assimilative multivariate data in water-carbon coupling researches under future climate change scenarios were also prospected.