About this Agricultural and Biological Sciences article
Comparing Ecological and Evolutionary Variability Within Datasets by Raphaël Royauté; Ned A. Dochtermann is a Agricultural and Biological Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.
Many key questions in evolutionary ecology require the use of variance ratios such as heritability, repeatability, and individual resource specialization. These ratios allow researchers to understand how phenotypic variation is structured into genetic and non-genetic components, to identify how much organisms vary in the resources they use or how functional traits structure species communities. Understanding how evolutionary and ecological processes differ among populations and environments therefore often requires the comparison of these ratios across groups (i.e., populations, sexes, species). Inference based on comparisons of ratios can be limited, however. Variance ratios can remain the same across group despite very different values in the numerator and denominator variances. Moreover, evolutionary ecologists are most often interested in differences in specific variance components among groups rather than in differences in variance ratios per se. Recommendations for how to infer whether groups differ in variance are not clear in the literature. Using simulations, we show how questions regarding the estimation of variance components and their differences among groups can be ans
It is typically read by researchers, students, and practitioners in Agricultural and Biological Sciences.
- Author
- Raphaël Royauté; Ned A. Dochtermann
- Publisher
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC
- Published
- 2021
- Language
- EN
- Field
- Agricultural and Biological Sciences (Life Sciences)