Stronger control of surface conductance by soil water content than vapor pressure deficit regulates evapotranspiration in an urban forest in Beijing, 2012–2022

With urbanization rapidly increasing, evapotranspiration (ET) in urban forests plays an increasingly important role in urban hydrology and climate. However, large uncertainty remains regarding the regulating factors of ET in urban area. Using the eddy-covariance technique, we investigated the temporal variations of ET in an urban forest park in Beijing for 2012–2022. Daily ET was close to zero during winter and reached 3–6 mm day−1 in summer. Daily ET increased with vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and soil water content (SWC). When binning daily data into 10 bins according to percentiles of either SWC or VPD, surface conductance (gs) increased with SWC for all VPD bins, but showed weak responses to VPD for SWC bins. Monthly ET increased linearly with normalized difference vegetation index, showed a strong correlation with gs, and exhibited saturated responses to increasing monthly precipitation (PPT). Annual ET ranged from 326 to 566 mm (with the eleven-year mean of 428.66 ± 83.83 mm; mean±SD), and varied from 55 % to 148 % of annual PPT. Aggregated ET over the eleven years (4715 mm) accounted for 82 % of the aggregated PPT. Soil water replenishment through PPT from mid-summer to late autumn of the previous year was responsible for the generally higher monthly ET in spring relative to PPT, resulting in a weak correlation between annual ET and PPT in the same calendar year (R2= 0.28). The PPT in the early growing season partly promoted annual ET through its effect on summer gs. Our results suggest that biotic factors and PPT seasonality played an essential role in regulating ET at the seasonal and interannual scales, respectively. Soil dryness imposed additional constraints on gs at the finer timescale (i.e., days). Urban land-surface models should adequately address the soil moisture carryover effect to improve simulations.