During dry spells, dew and fog potentially play an increasingly important role in temperate grasslands. Research on the combined mechanisms of dew and fog inputs to ecosystems and distillation of water vapor from soil to plant surfaces is rare. Our results using stable water isotopes highlight the importance of dew and fog inputs to temperate grasslands during dry spells and reveal the complexity of the local water cycling in such conditions, including different pathways of dew and fog inputs.