Quantifying the Responses of Evapotranspiration and Its Components to Vegetation Restoration and Climate Change on the Loess Plateau of China

Quantitatively identifying the influences of vegetation restoration (VR) on water resources is crucial to ecological planning. Although coverage has improved Loess Plateau (LP) China since implementation VR policy, way dynamics regional evapotranspiration (ET) remains controversial. In this study, we first investigate long-term spatiotemporal trends total ET (TET) components, including ground evaporation (GE) and canopy (CET, sum interception transpiration) based GLEAM-ET dataset. The changes are attributed LP from 2000 2015 these results quantitatively evaluated here using Community Land Model (CLM). Finally, relative contributions climate change identified by combining scenarios scenarios. show that positive effect CET offset negative GE, which in a weak variation TET at an annual scale increased only shown summer. Regardless representative concentration pathway (RCP4.5 or RCP8.5), differences resulted responses different conditions ranging ?3.7 ?1.2 mm, while RCP4.5 RCP8.5 caused increase 0.1 65.3 mm. These findings imply might play dominant role variability LP, work emphasizes importance comprehensively considering interactions among factors assess ET.