Regional and local determinants of macrophyte community compositions in high-latitude lakes of Finland

Species distributions are structured by regional and local determinants, which operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The purpose of our work was to distinguish the relative roles of local variables, climate, geographical location and post glaciation condition (i.e., delineation between supra- and subaquatic lakes during the post-glacial Ancylus Lake) in explaining variation in macrophyte community composition of all taxa, helophytes and hydrophytes. In addition, we investigated how these four explanatory variable groups affected macrophyte strategy groups based on Grime’s classification. Using partial linear regression and variation partitioning, we found that macrophyte communities are primarily filtered by local determinants together with regional characteristics at the studied spatial scale. We further evidenced that post glaciation condition indirectly influenced on local water quality variables, which in turn directly contributed to the macrophyte communities. We thus suggest that regional determinants interact with local-scale abiotic factors in explaining macrophyte community patterns and examining only regional or local factors is not sufficient for understanding how aquatic macrophyte communities are structured locally and regionally.