Stomatal Resistance (Rs) is one of the most important parameters in the meteorological models for weather or climate analysis and hydrological scenario estimations. The information for estimating Rs is sparse particularly in the tropics limiting the development of a detailed global terrestrial biosphere-atmosphere interaction analysis. One of the reasons for the scarcity of tropical data is the high cost of instrumentation. A hypothesis is presented to estimate Rs from plant-nutrient status in a field study using stomatal aperture observations to develop a simple, cost-effective technique for first-order estimations. Comparisons with observations from a tropical field experiment are encouraging and an approach is suggested using this method for initialization of numerical models using remote sensing techniques based on nitrogen, humidity, and temperature as sufficient parameters.¿ 1997 American Geophysical Union