Can climate change exacerbate the genetic consequences of forest fragmentation?:Effects of drought stress on heterozygosity-fitness correlations in pedunculate oak

In small and spatially isolated forest fragments, increased homozygosity may directly affect individual tree fitness, through the expression of deleterious alleles that influence morphological and physiological traits. Climate change induced drought may exacerbate the detrimental genetic consequences of forest fragmentation because the fitness response to low levels of heterozygosity is generally thought to be more pronounced under environmental stress than under optimal conditions. To test this hypothesis, we performed a greenhouse experiment in which fitness traits of 6-months-old seedlings... Mehr ...