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.