Accurate estimation of reference crop evapotranspiration (ET0) is of great significance to crop water use and agricultural water resources management. This study evaluated the performance of four bio-inspired algorithm optimized kernel-based nonlinear extension of Arps decline (KNEA) models, namely KNEA with grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA-KNEA), KNEA with grey wolf optimizer algorithm (GWO-KNEA), KNEA with particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO-KNEA), and KNEA with salp swarm algorithm (SSA-KNEA), on estimating monthly ET0 across C...