Common
Effective population size
Ecological concept
Effective population size
The effective population size (Ne) is the size of an idealised population that would experience the same rate of genetic drift as the real population. Idealised populations are those where each locus evolves independently, following the assumptions of the neutral theory of molecular evolution. The effective population size is normally smaller than the census population size N. This can be due to chance events prevent some individuals from breeding, to occasional population bottlenecks, to background selection, and to genetic hitchhiking. The same real population could have a different effective population size for different properties of interest, such as genetic drift (or more precisely, the speed of coalescence) over one generation vs. over many generations. Within a species, areas of the genome that have more genes and/or less genetic recombination tend to have lower effective population sizes, because of the effects of selection at linked sites. In a population with selection at many...
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