Deforestation plays an essential role in land cover changes in tropical area. It resulted in changing surface biophysical characteristics such as albedo and surface roughness altering the climate, heat fluxes as well as CO2 fluxes. Thus, this study aims to analyse the biogeophysical and biogeochemical processes in forest, shrub, grass, and soybean. Also, the study analyses the coupling strength in the terrestrial segment. This analysis is conducted using the Community Land Model Version 5 (CLM5). The results showed that land-use changes alter surface heat fluxes. Forest changing into shrub, grass, and soybean decreased latent heat fluxes and increased sensible heat fluxes. Land-use changes also alter carbon uptake, although it did not necessarily reduce the net primary production (NPP) and efficiency. Forest changing into soybean will increase NPP, while its changes to grass and shrub will decrease NPP. Among all land covers, soybean had higher carbon use efficiency (CUE) due to the availability of water and soil nutrient supply. In comparison, the forest had lower CUE due to its high respiration to maintain its biomass. Coupling strength between soil moisture and latent heat fluxes in all land covers was positive, but the R-squared was relatively low. This result indicated that there was another factor impacting surface energy balance partition such as vegetation cover.