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The effects of canopy evaporation and intensity smoothing during rain events on hillslope subsurface stormflow are poorly understood. While watershed manipulation experiments have suggested that these processes are important at long timescales, such processes may also be important in storm-timescale responses. Notwithstanding, there are few hillslopes for which both internal subsurface stormflow generation processes and canopy processes are known, so canopy interception effects on subsurface stormflow have not been tested mechanistically. Furthermore, it has not yet been possible to separate the effects of canopy evaporation from intensity smoothing in terms of which component of interception most affects hillslope response. We report a series of virtual experiments (numerical experiments driven by collective field intelligence) using HYDRUS-2D to model flow in a well-studied and characterized …