CropMetaPop: a population genetics program to simulate the evolution of crop metapopulations

Abstract

Stochastic simulation programs are useful to study the evolution of crop populations in changing environments. These programs require to take into account some specific features characterizing farmers practices such as seed circulation or seed mixing. However such human-mediated evolutionary processes are different from the classical colonization or migration models used in most existing stochastic simulation programs for quantitative population genetics. To fill this gap, CropMetaPop is an individual based forward-time simulation program for quantitative population genetics developed to represent a diversity of socially established rules underlying seed circulation between farmers. For instance, one farmer can give seeds to neighbours according to his stock and receive from them according to his needs. Crop-Metapop also takes into account other important evolutionary forces encountered in crop diversity management systems, such as different population sizes and selection modalities for different populations. CropMetaPop makes it possible to study the impacts of different crop biodiversity management strategies. For this purpose, it simulates the genetic evolution over time of several crop populations submitted to genetic drift and selection and linked by explicitly modeled seed circulation and mixtures.