Résumé
In numerous species, individual dispersal is restricted in space so that "continuous" populations evolve under isolation by distance. A method based on individual genotypes assuming a lattice population model was recently developed to estimate the product D{sigma}2, where D is the population density and {sigma}2 is the average squared parent-offspring distance. We evaluated the influence on this method of both mutation rate and mutation model, with a particular reference to microsatellite markers, as well as that of the spatial scale of sampling. Moreover, we developed and tested a nonparametric bootstrap procedure allowing the construction of confidence intervals for the estimation of D{sigma}2. These two objectives prompted us to develop a computer simulation algorithm based on the coalescent theory giving individual genotypes for a continuous population under isolation by distance. Our results show that the characteristics of mutational processes at microsatellite loci, namely the allele size homoplasy generated by stepwise mutations, constraints on allele size, and change of slippage rate with repeat number, have little influence on the estimation of D{sigma}2. In contrast, a high genetic diversity ({approx}0.7–0.8), as is commonly observed for microsatellite markers, substantially increases the precision of the estimation. However, very high levels of genetic diversity (>0.85) were found to bias the estimation. We also show that statistics taking into account allele size differences give unreliable estimations (i.e., high variance of D{sigma}2 estimation) even under a strict stepwise mutation model. Finally, although we show that this method is reasonably robust with respect to the sampling scale, sampling individuals at a local geographical scale gives more precise estimations of D{sigma}2.