Advances in Forest Evapotranspiration Across Natural and Urban Landscapes: Processes, Quantification, and Applications

Forest evapotranspiration (ET) plays a central role in regulating water, carbon, and energy exchanges between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere, thereby influencing ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, microclimate regulation, and climate feedbacks. Across both natural and urban landscapes, forests experience increasing pressures from climate change, land-use conversion, forest management practices, and extreme disturbances. Despite its importance, accurately quantifying ET and understanding its underlying ecohydrological processes remain challenging due to complex biophysical controls, spatial heterogeneity, and scale-dependent dynamics.

This Research Topic aims to advance the understanding of forest evapotranspiration and associated ecohydrological processes across natural, managed, and urban forest systems. By integrating field observations, remote sensing technologies, and modeling approaches, the collection seeks to bridge knowledge across spatial and temporal scales and across gradients of disturbance and management intensity. A key goal is to highlight innovative methods and interdisciplinary approaches that improve monitoring, modeling, and application of forest ET knowledge to support sustainable forest management, landscape planning, and nature-based solutions under global change.

This Research Topic welcomes original research, reviews, and perspectives addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Quantification of forest evapotranspiration using field-based approaches (e.g., eddy covariance, sap flow, throughfall exclusion, paired watershed studies)

• Applications of remote sensing technologies (e.g., UAVs, LiDAR, satellite data) for estimating forest ET and related ecohydrological variables

• Ecohydrological modeling of forest ET across scales, from stand to landscape and regional levels

• Effects of forest management practices (e.g., thinning, prescribed burning, restoration) on evapotranspiration and water–carbon–energy dynamics

• Impacts of climate change, land-use change, and urbanization on forest ET and water cycling

• Responses of forest evapotranspiration to extreme disturbances such as wildfire, hurricanes, droughts, and deforestation

• Integration of forest ecohydrology into landscape planning, urban forestry, and nature-based solutions for water and climate resilience

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Forest evapotranspiration, forest management, forest planning, ecohydrological monitoring, water–carbon–energy dynamics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.