Moshe Jasper Profile picture
Researcher at Melbourne University. Focuses on population genomics and the dispersal of close kin.

Oct 11, 2021, 14 tweets

Excited to announce the publication of our new #dispersal paper, #Rstats package & #shinyapp @kindisperse with @molecology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11…. We supply tools to simulate and estimate intergenerational dispersal via close kin. @PEARG_Lab @GrndCtrl2_DrTom
1/13

Intergenerational dispersal links the movements of organisms throughout their lives with the diffusion of a species' genetic information across space and time.

Its simplest form, parent-offspring dispersal, lies at the foundations of the theory of isolation by distance.
2/13

Estimating parent-offspring dispersal is difficult for species such as Aedes aegypti, as existing techniques don't track a single mosquito across its entire breeding cycle.

To do this, our method draws on two important features of intergenerational dispersal:
3/13

1. The variance of parent-offspring (PO) dispersal can be broken down into a variety of smaller dispersal events that occur across the life cycle.
4/13

2. These sub-PO dispersal events are shared between various pedigree relationships (FS, 1C, etc.) that otherwise differ in the number of PO dispersal events separating them.
5/13

In our previous paper, we applied these principles to the distributions of full sibs (a), half sibs (b) and cousins (c) to derive an estimate of PO dispersal in Aedes aegypti in an urban apartment complex in Malaysia. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
6/13

Q: Why are we so excited by this new paper and its linked package & app?

A: We believe the @kindisperse R package builds on our prior work by providing a useful set of tools for researchers investigating intergenerational dispersal in their own species. Here's why:
7/13

(1) We supply functions that simulate intergenerational dispersal across all standard pedigree categories through to the third degree (second cousin) and allow the inclusion of kernels dominated by long-distance dispersal.
8/13

(2) We use these simulations to check the impact of different study sight designs on estimates of PO dispersal and so supply a set of best practice recommendations for designing intergenerational dispersal studies.
9/13

(3) We provide tools to estimate PO dispersal from a wide variety of life stages and models that extend this estimation toolkit from the original mosquito context to an arbitrary range of species and life histories. Paper supplies worked example for Antechinus spp.
10/13

(4) Central package functions are embedded in an easy to use #shinyapp which can also be found online at kindisperse.shinyapps.io/kindisperse
11/13

The kindisperse package & tutorial can be found on GitHub via github.com/moshejasper/ki…, or downloaded to R straight from CRAN. For package updates, tutorials & news, follow @kindisperse.
12/13

Special thanks to my co-authors @GrndCtrl2_DrTom and @ary_hoffmann
13/13

Initial tweet's link to paper was to pdf. Correct link here. doi.org/10.1111/1755-0…
14/13

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