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Tropical forest responses to increasing droughts are an important feedback to future climate change, but predicting these remains difficult. Here we tested the hypothesis that Amazon forest responses to recent large-scale droughts (in 2005, 2010, and 2015) depend not only on climate but on local and regional environments. We used height above the nearest drainage (HAND) as a remote sensing/modeling derived proxy of hydrological environment and water availability, and investigated its influence on tropical photosynthetic dynamics during droughts in 2005, 2010 and 2015/2016 by analyzing two satellite-based measures of forest photosynthetic properties (enhanced vegetation index, EVI, corrected for sun-sensor geometry, and solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, SIF). We found, first, that at local scales, hydrological environments strongly influence forest response within southern Amazon forests: drought …