Oaks are a widely represented woody species across the main European forest biomes, ranging from semi-arid Mediterranean shrub lands to cool temperate and transitional boreal forests. We provide quantitative evidence of large-scale distribution and abundance patterns of oaks across Europe. In addition, we present key demographic processes, such as mortality, which underlie deterministic mechanisms behind large-scale distribution patterns; chiefly competitive exclusion and complementarity versus environmental filtering along the main energy-productivity gradient of Europe. Finally, we investigate the role of concomitant climate changes, land use legacies and management regimes as key drivers of future oak forest distribution in continental Europe. Overall, oak distribution and dominance at the population and community levels is largely determined by environmental filtering together with intra- and inter-specific functional differences as major elements driving oak species distribution and dominance at the population and community levels, but these processes are strongly modulated by global change which may result in a significant alteration of current distribution of European oak forests.