Wild pedigrees: the way forward

Abstract

Metrics derived from pedigrees are key to investigating several major issues in evolutionary biology, including the quantitative genetic architecture of traits, inbreeding depression, and the evolution of cooperation and inbreeding avoidance. There is merit in studying these issues in natural populations experiencing spatially and temporally variable environmental conditions, since these analyses may yield different results from laboratory studies and allow us to understand population responses to rapid environmental change. Partial pedigrees are now available for several natural populations which are the subject of long-term individual-based studies, and analyses using these pedigrees are leading to important insights. Accurate pedigree construction supported by molecular genetic data is now feasible across a wide range of taxa, and even where only imprecise pedigrees are available it is possible to estimate the consequences of imprecision for the questions of interest. In outbred diploid populations, the pedigree approach is superior to analyses based on marker-based pairwise estimators of coancestry.