Documenting the patterns of biological diversity on Earth has always been a central challenge in macroecology and biogeography. However, we are only beginning to generate an understanding of the global patterns and determinants of macrophyte diversity. Here, we studied large‐scale variation and community‐environment relationships of lake macrophytes along climatic and geographical gradients using regional data from six continents. We applied statistical routines typically used in the context of metacommunity studies to provide novel insights into macrophyte community compositional patterns within regions worldwide. We found that lake macrophyte metacommunities followed clumped species replacement structures, suggesting that two or more species groups were responding similarly to the environment within regions. Underlying such general convergence, our results also provided evidence that community‐environment relationships were largely context‐dependent, stressing that no single mechanism is enough to account for the complex nature of compositional variation. Surprisingly, we found no general relationships between functional or phylogenetic composition and main metacommunity types, suggesting that linking multi‐trait and evolutionary information to the elements of metacommunity structure is not straightforward. Our findings highlight that global conservation initiatives and biodiversity protection need to capture environmental variation at the metacommunity level, and acknowledge the highly context‐dependent patterns in the community‐environment relationships of lake macrophytes. Overall, we emphasize the need to embrace the potential complexity of ecological inferences in metacommunity organization across the globe.

中文翻译：

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湖泊大型植物元社区结构的要素：全球变化与社区-环境关系

记录地球上生物多样性的模式一直是宏观生态学和生物地理学的主要挑战。然而，我们才刚刚开始对大型植物多样性的全球模式和决定因素产生一种了解。在这里，我们使用来自六大洲的区域数据研究了沿气候和地理梯度的大型湖泊植物的大型变异和社区-环境关系。我们应用了通常在元社区研究中使用的统计程序，以提供有关全球区域内大型植物群落组成模式的新颖见解。我们发现湖泊大型植物的元群落遵循丛生的物种替代结构，这表明两个或多个物种群对区域内环境的响应相似。这种普遍趋同的基础 我们的研究结果还提供了证据，表明社区与环境之间的关系在很大程度上取决于上下文，并强调没有单一的机制足以说明成分变化的复杂性。出乎意料的是，我们发现功能或系统发育组成与主要元社区类型之间没有一般关系，这表明将多特征和进化信息与元社区结构要素联系起来并不容易。我们的发现突出表明，全球保护计划和生物多样性保护需要在元社区水平上捕捉环境变化，并承认大型水生植物在社区与环境之间的高度依存于环境的模式。总体，