The investigations on hydrogen isotopic fractionation factor (ε) of plant leaf waxes not only benefit the understanding of hydrogen isotopic fractionation mechanism, but are also the fundamental issues of using hydrogen isotope (δD) of leaf waxes to trace environmental changes. Up to now, however, our knowledge on plant ε values is still limited, which greatly hampers the applications of leaf wax δD values in environmental tracing studies. In this work, we systematically investigated the δD compositions of terrestrial plant leaf waxes and their corresponding source water (precipitation and soil water) in different climatic zones of China, and continuously monitored δD compositions of leaf waxes and their corresponding source water (soil water and leaf water) in a field rainfall manipulation experiment. Then we compared the leaf wax ε values between terrestrial plants and submerged plants (ε _{precipitation}, ε _{soil water}, ε _{leaf water} and ε _{lake water}, representing the isotopic fractionation between plant n-alkanes δD and precipitation δD, soil water δD, leaf water δD and lake water δD, respectively). The results show that ε _{precipitation} values of terrestrial plants have large variations (from –190‰ to –20‰) and become negative with the increasing of aridity index. This is possibly caused by the δD changes of source water (from precipitation to soil water and then to leaf water) during plant leaf wax synthesis under various evapo-transpiration conditions in different climatic zones. The rainfall manipulation experiment shows that leaf water δD values are generally higher than soil water δD values and the latter are higher than precipitation δD values, resulting in an order of ε _{leaf water} < ε _{soil water} < ε _{precipitation}. This further demonstrates that the determination of source water δD affects the quantification of leaf wax ε values. As leaf wax δD values of submerged plants are less affected by evapo-transpiration, their ε _{lake water} values may represent the biosynthetic ε of leaf waxes in higher plants. Compared with the ε _{precipitation} values of terrestrial plants, the ε _{lake water} values of submerged plants display a smaller range (–153 ± 5‰), which are close to the terrestrial ε _{precipitation} values in humid areas. Therefore, we believe that the biosynthetic ε values of terrestrial plant leaf waxes should be a constant (ca. –153 ± 5‰), and the observed unstable apparent ε _{precipitation} values are possibly caused by the varied degree of evapo-transpiration effect on the water that plant utilized in different climatic conditions. This effect should be taken into consideration when applying δD values of leaf waxes to trace environmental changes.