Abstract
Effective population size (Ne) is a central concept in evolutionary biology and conservation genetics. It predicts rates of loss of neutral genetic variation, .xation of deleterious and favourable alleles, and the increase of inbreeding experienced by a population. A method exists for the estimation of Ne from the observed linkage disequilibrium between unlinked loci in a population sample. While an increasing number of studies have applied this method in natural and managed populations, its reliability has not yet been evaluated. We developed a computer program to calculate this estimator of Ne using the most widely used linkage disequilibrium algorithm and used simulations to show that this estimator is strongly biased when the sample size is small (<100) and below the true Ne. This is probably due to the linkage disequilibrium generated by the sampling process itself and the inadequate correction for this phenomenon in the method. Results suggest that Ne estimates derived using this method should be regarded with caution in many cases. To improve the method’s reliability and usefulness we propose a way to determine whether a given sample size exceeds the population Ne and can therefore be used for the computation of an unbiased estimate