<p>Moisture loss is a familiar and widely observed phenomenon perceived on a daily basis. Much of the water loss, due to the phase change from liquid to vapours, occurs from bare water surfaces, lands, and green cover. Understanding the magnitude of moisture loss and its physical mechanism in these three completely different types of surfaces is crucial as it forms an important component in hydrological balance and the water cycle. Evaporation is driven by the difference in the vapour concentration at the evaporating surface and in the ambient. A key aspect of evaporation (and transpiration) is obtained from an energy budget which helps in understanding the strong and non-linear coupling between the evaporation rate and the surface temperature. Apart from the optical properties of the surface, the rate of evaporation also depends on the wetness of a surface i.e., completely (water and fully saturated soils) or partially (unsaturated soils and leaves). Over a water body, evaporation occurs uniformly throughout its surface but in partially wet surfaces, it occurs from discontinuous local sites (like stomata in leaves or pores in soils). The open area percentage of stomata is quite low (1–10% only) but it can transpire at rates equivalent to that of a bare water surface. Soils have a slightly higher open area ratio (35–50%) compared to the leaves and the rate of evaporation depends on the saturation level. In the case of a discontinuous wet surface, three important length scales exist – opening size, opening-to-opening spacing, and concentration boundary layer thickness. Soil-like surfaces exhibit two key features – (a) formation of a wet patch consisting of a considerably large number of particles and (b) evaporation from within the pore; the latter is a pore-scale feature while the former is at a larger scale. Broadly speaking, soil surface water content and the moisture distribution inside in the vertical direction govern the rates of evaporation, apart from the environmental conditions. Assessing the conditions of a soil surface is hence of paramount interest for many purposes – agricultural sector, evaporation maps, and remote sensing. We discuss evaporation from various types of fully wet and discontinuously wet surfaces under natural convection conditions. Results are mainly from laboratory-scale experiments, under controlled IR heating. The surfaces include those of conventional porous media consisting of spherical particles, with different sizes, and non-conventional porous media, leaf-like surfaces, closely packed vertically or horizontally oriented circular rods, and closely packed vertical plates. We discuss the impact of particle size and inter-pore spacing on the evaporation dynamics. Finally, we comment on the issues of scaling up these results to larger scales, for example, those encountered in the atmosphere.</p>