Equation 16 · Evolutionary Biology and Ecology in Practice: An Advanced Technical Guide
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subscript
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Effective population size, , is not census size. It is the size of an idealized population — with random mating, no selection, non-overlapping generations, and equal sex ratio — that would show the same rate of genetic drift as the real population under study. Because governs how fast a population loses genetic variation and how strongly drift competes with selection, it is one of the central quantities in conservation genetics: a population with a small loses adaptive variation and accumulates inbreeding depression faster than its census size alone would suggest.
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