Population fragmentation

First, inbreeding forces competition with relatives, which decreases the evolutionary fitness of the species.

[5] When a population is small, the influence of genetic drift increases, which leads to less and/or random fixation of alleles.

In turn, this leads to increased homozygosity, negatively affecting individual fitness.

The performance of plants may be compromised by less effective selection which causes an accumulation of deleterious mutations in small populations.

A reduction in fitness may occur in small plant populations because of mutation accumulation, reduced genetic diversity, and increased inbreeding.