Gene flow, effective population sizes, and genetic variance components in birds.

TLDR: The objective of this paper is to estimate gene flow, effective population sizes and genetic variance components for several avian species using available dispersal data.

Abstract: The genetic structure of natural populations is of general interest because many current models in ecology and evolution involve assumptions about the viscosity of breeding populations. For instance, theories of group and kinship selection, local adaptation, and speciation all depend on the magnitude of an among-deme component of genetic variance. In spite of this, information on genetic population structure is not available for most taxa. Such information can be obtained through two general classes of analysis. One approach is to analyze genotypic frequencies in populations to obtain direct estimates of genetic population structure using F statistics (Cockerham, 1969, 1973). This has been attempted for a few taxa with electrophoretic data (Hedgecock, 1978; Smith et al., 1978). A second approach is to infer the theoretically expected among-deme variance component using estimates of dispersal parameters in a fashion analogous to that used by Dobzhansky and Wright (1943, 1947). This approach has not been widely used, but this is certainly due in pdrt to the difficulty of obtaining quantitative estimates of dispersal distributions for natural populations. Some effort has been devoted to this method, however, in Drosophila (Crumpacker and Williams, 1973; Powell et al., 1976), a lizard (Kerster, 1964), and a snail (Greenwood, 1974). It is somewhat surprising, though, that this type of analysis has not been extended to avian species; banding, population, and behavioral studies have generated dispersal information that could be used in such a way. The objective of this paper is to estimate gene flow, effective population sizes and genetic variance components for several avian species using available dispersal data. To do this it