Surface evaporation is one of the main processes of the hydrological cycle. A thorough understanding of the evaporation process is essential for effective water management. The hydrological cycle is projected to intensify resulting from global warming. This challenges operational water management, especially in the densely populated delta of the Netherlands. In this thesis, dynamics and drivers of evaporation during the warm season were studied based on eddy covariance (EC) observations in the Netherlands. To this end, we installed EC systems at two locations at the border of Lake IJssel during two summer seasons. Transport was found to be the most important driver of open water evaporation, resulting in a different diurnal cycle compared to terrestrial evaporation. The drivers of 19 historical flux sites covering six land cover types were distributed along three axes: energy, water and transport. This revealed that land cover partly explains evaporation dynamics. The obtained knowledge about the drivers can contribute to optimize the parameterization of evaporation in hydrological models.