Effective Population Size

In population genetics, the concept of effective population size N_e was introduced by the American geneticist Sewall Wright. He defined it as "the number of breeding individuals in an idealised population that would show the same amount of dispersion of allele frequencies under random genetic drift or the same amount of inbreeding as the population under consideration". More generally, an effective population size may be defined as the number of individuals in an idealised population that has a value of any given population genetic quantity that is equal to the value of that quantity in the population of interest. The two population genetic quantities identified by Wright were the one-generation increase in variance across replicate populations (variance effective population size) and the one-generation change in the inbreeding coefficient (inbreeding effective population size). These two are closely linked, and derived from F-statistics, but they are not identical.

Today, the effective population size is usually estimated empirically with respect to the sojourn or coalescence time, estimated as the within-species genetic diversity divided by the mutation rate. Another important effective population size is the selection effective population size 1/s_critical, where s_critical is the critical value of the selection coefficient at which selection becomes more important than genetic drift.

However defined, the effective population size is usually less than the census population size (N).