Enhanced effects of biotic interactions on predicting multispecies spatial distribution of submerged macrophytes after eutrophication

Water eutrophication creates unfavorable environmental conditions for submerged macrophytes. In these situations, biotic interactions may be particularly important for explaining and predicting the submerged macrophytes occurrence. Here, we evaluate the roles of biotic interactions in predicting spatial occurrence of submerged macrophytes in 1959 and 2009 for Dianshan Lake in eastern China, which became eutrophic since the 1980s. For the four common species occurred in 1959 and 2009, null species distribution models based on abiotic variables and full models based on both abiotic and biotic variables were developed using generalized linear model (GLM) and boosted regression trees (BRT) to determine whether the biotic variables improved the model performance. Hierarchical Bayesian-based joint species distribution models capable of detecting paired biotic interactions were established for each species in both periods to evaluate the changes in the biotic interactions. In most of the GLM and BRT models, the full models showed better performance than the null models in predicting the species presence/absence, and the relative importance of the biotic variables in the full models increased from less than 50% in 1959 to more than 50% in 2009 for each species. Moreover, co-occurrence correlation of each paired species interaction was higher in 2009 than that in 1959. The findings suggest biotic interactions that tend to be positive play more important roles in the spatial distribution of multispecies assemblages of macrophytes and should be included in prediction models to improve prediction accuracy when forecasting macrophytes’ distribution under eutrophication stress.