Dealing With the Complexity of Effective Population Size in Conservation Practice.

Effective population size () is one of the most important parameters in evolutionary biology, as it is linked to the long-term survival capability of species. Therefore, greatly interests conservation geneticists, but it is also very relevant to policymakers, managers, and conservation practitioners. Molecular methods to estimate rely on various assumptions, including no immigration, panmixia, random sampling, absence of spatial genetic structure, and/or mutation-drift equilibrium.

Assessing ex situ genetic and ecogeographic conservation in a threatened but widespread oak after range-wide collecting effort.

Although the genetic diversity and structure of in situ populations has been investigated in thousands of studies, the genetic composition of ex situ plant populations has rarely been studied. A better understanding of how much genetic diversity is conserved ex situ, how it is distributed among locations (e.g.