Conclusion
Our study is the first to present scenarios for the effects of climate
and land-use change of the potential species richness of submerged
macrophytes for different lake types and species groups. Temperature
increase should raise the number of potentially growing species, even
without increasing the species pool by invasive species from warmer
regions. The effect of increase or decrease turbidity and nutrients
content depend on the lake type and depths. We see those future changes
of species richness are multi-dimensional. The study helps to fill
knowledge gaps concerning today’s distribution and potential future
developments of species richness of submerged macrophytes. It shows that
mechanistic modelling can improve the understanding of macroecological
patterns of macrophytes and stress the need for process-based
assessments of environmental change. This is paramount to move the
predictive agenda from relying on poorly transferable correlative models
to models that directly simulate the mechanics of changing conditions.