Spatial molecular ecological models for genotyped adults and offspring

This paper introduces molecular ecological models in which pollination and seed dispersal primarily occur among nearby trees according to some decreasing functions of interdistances. The models are based on inhomogeneous Poisson processes and applicable to mapped data of genotyped adults and offspring. Parameters in the process can be optimized by the maximum likelihood method. If the optimized model satisfactorily fits given data, seed dispersal and pollen flow are quantitatively assessed under specific function forms. If not, the degree of the unfitting expresses the degree of the influence of some other factors such as unequal female reproductive success, seed movement by animals and selection, and the inhomogeneous Poisson process can be extended to include such factors. The methodology is demonstrated for a Fagus crenata population. The inhomogeneous Poisson process model can be used for checking the relevance of the function forms used in previous theoretical studies of isolation-by-distance as well as for a basic null assumption that a given population is formed only by limited pollen and seed dispersal.