Abstract
The genetic effective size (Ne) is arguably one of the most important characteristics of a population as it impacts the rate of loss of genetic diversity. Methods that estimate Ne are important in population and conservation genetic studies as they quantify the risk of a population being inbred or lacking genetic diversity. Yet there are very few methods that can estimate the Ne from data from a single population and without extensive information about the genetics of the population, such as a linkage map, or a reference genome of the species of interest. We present ONeSAMP 3.0, an algorithm for estimating Ne from single nucleotide polymorphism data collected from a single population sample using approximate Bayesian computation and local linear regression. We demonstrate the utility of this approach using simulated Wright-Fisher populations, and empirical data from five endangered Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis) populations to evaluate the performance of ONeSAMP 3.0 compared to a commonly used Ne estimator. Our results show that ONeSAMP 3.0 is broadly applicable to natural populations and is flexible enough that future versions could easily include summary statistics appropriate for a suite of biological and sampling conditions. ONeSAMP 3.0 is publicly available under the GNU General Public License at https://github.com/AaronHong1024/ONeSAMP_3.