Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Exploring Population Change Detection By Monitoring Effective Number Of Breeders, Brian Trethewey

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Detecting if a population is in decline is an important objective for biologists and conservationists who are monitoring threatened populations. As genetic methods improve effective population size (N_e) and effective number of breeders (N_b) continue to gain popularity as a way to monitor species. Using simulated populations and linkage disequilibrium, we explored detecting population decline through N_b in age structured populations. Through comparisons of sensitivity (1 – false negatives) and specificity (1- false positives) over 1000 replicates, we explored how factors such as starting N_b, number of SNPs, number of individuals …