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Evapotranspiration is the sum of all processes by which water moves from the land surface to the atmosphere via evaporation and transpiration. Evapotranspiration includes water evaporation into the atmosphere from the soil surface, evaporation from the capillary fringe of the groundwater table, and evaporation from water bodies on land. Evapotranspiration also includes transpiration, which is the water movement from the soil to the atmosphere via plants. Transpiration occurs when plants take up liquid water from the soil and release water vapor into the air from their leaves.

USGS, Evapotranspiration and the Water Cycle

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Permaculture Instructor Andrew millison explains how trees are connected to water in the atmosphere as well as water flowing through the landscape. This video articulates the amazing role that trees play to ecosystem and climate health, and how their removal causes the drought-flood cycle.

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Plants sweat much like humans do—and observing this behavior can help predict where wildfires will be most severe.

Excerpt from this story from Earther/Gizmodo:

The way plants sweat could be a valuable tool in helping us predict how wildfires behave. That’s the conclusion of a recent study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography from researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The temperatures of plants can tell us a lot about their health and the health of the ecosystems they live in. Under normal conditions, plants take in water through their roots and release it into the atmosphere through tiny pores in their leaves, a process known as evapotranspiration. But if the plants are under stress—especially if the weather is hotter and drier than usual—they’ll retain more water, which increases their temperature.

The NASA researchers wanted to see if the plants’ levels of evapotranspiration could correlate with areas burned in California’s 2020 wildfire season, a record-breaking summer that saw some 10,000 fires burn more than 4.3 million acres. They looked at data from six areas in Southern California and the Sierra Nevada mountains that were badly damaged in the 2020 season, comparing ECOSTRESS measurements from the months before the fires as well as satellite imagery taken after the fires.

Overall, the study found definite relationships between plant temperature and wildfire severity. In some regions, plants that were under more heat duress tended to be in areas with more intense burns. However, there were some important nuances in the data, given the diversity of the ecosystems at play.

“Some areas, such as pine forests in the Sierra Nevada, if they were more stressed, that corresponded to them having more severe burning. But in some other areas that had different types of land cover, such as grasslands, the less-stressed vegetation had higher burn,” Pascolini-Campbell said. The researchers hypothesized that in some ecosystems, like grasslands, less-stressed vegetation could actually grow more plentifully and ultimately provide more fuel for a fire. “We’re seeing these kinds of nuanced relationships that really depended on the type of vegetation present.”

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In semi-arid regions, under natural conditions, a large fraction of rainfall (~60-70%) soaks into the soil, is absorbed by vegetation and evapotranspires back to the atmosphere. The rest runs off (~20-25%) or recharges groundwater (~5-10%). Groundwater from replenished aquifers seeps into streams through the dry season. Cities fundamentally transform the natural water cycle. As land gets paved and green cover disappears, very little rainwater infiltrates. Evapotranspiration is much lower and almost all the rain ends up as run-off. This is not a problem in itself. Generations of civil engineers have been trained in stormwater design with one objective—to build pipes large enough to transport water from a “50-year storm” (intense rain event that occurs, on average, once in a 50 years) as quickly as possible. Climate change has complicated this by increasing the frequency of such “extreme events”.

Veena Srinivasan, 'Kerala lessons: In a rapidly urbanizing India, it’s time to reimagine water in cities', Livemint