Increasing actual evapotranspiration on the Loess Plateau of China: An insight from anthropologic activities and climate change

Actual evapotranspiration (ETa) is an important element of water circulation, and susceptible to environmental change. Precise estimation of ETa and identifying its key influence factors are of great importance. Loess Plateau has been largely affected by human activities and climate change, and the dynamics of ETa and its key influencing factors remain unknown in this region. The spatio-temporal variations of ETa over Loess Plateau from 2000 to 2020 were depicted on the basis of the ETWatch model. Then the individual contributions of climatic factors and human activities to ETa variation were quantified by applying generalized additive model. Results indicated that the annual average ETa during the period of 2000–2020 displayed a fluctuating increasing pattern from 386.67 mm in 2000 to 544.73 mm in 2020, with a growth rate of 6.25 mm⋅yr−1. Spatially, the ETa displays a downward pattern from southeast to northwest, which is highly similar to vegetation coverage with the coefficients of 0.766–0.832. The ETa of forest, grassland, cropland, shrub, barren land and impervious land exhibited positive or negative significantly correlations with their corresponding land cover area at the 0.05 or 0.01 level. Sunshine duration, temperature and precipitation are the top three factors showing high correlations with ETa. The results of contribution analysis suggested that the variations in ETa were largely controlled by LUCC in the Loess Plateau, where the LUCC accounted for 52.89% of the total ETa. The impacts of LUCC on ETa were greater than that of climate change on ETa, although climate change was dominant in a few years. These results could contribute to optimizing water resource management and developing various water-saving tactics in the Loess Plateau.