Input - Genetic Diversity in Establishing Plant Populations: Founder Number and Geometry - page 53

with lower left corner coordinates (-2560, -2560) and upper right corner
coordinates (2559, 2559), which includes 26,214,400 possible grid points to
be occupied by individuals of the species. To place this in some perspective,
the Kentucky Division of Forestry estimates that there are about 6.6 million
hemlocks in the eastern portion of the state. Obviously, smaller plants may
have higher densities, but we should be able to model realistic preserves
for most species, especially since NEWGARDEN is designed to explore
newly establishing populations.
Number of Generations
The number (n) entered for the statement
<Number_Generations value=“n”/>
designates the number of generations for which cohort and population data
will be output. The listing of this data always begins with the values for the
founding generation (the output uses the word “age” to denote generation,
so the founding generation is age = 0). Thus, if you specify that you want
a printout of data for each of 30 generations, you will receive data output
on the founding generation and 29 consecutive generations (through age
29, that is, 29 rounds of mating will be analyzed).
Trials and Replicate Runs
One trial refers to submitting an input file to NEWGARDEN, and it
culminates in the generation of all the data output in that trial's output
fi le. For any particular trial, the user can specify the number of replicate
runs of the input conditions, each run beginning with identical initial
conditions specifi ed by that trial's input fi le. NEWGARDEN output for
one trial thus consists of summary statistics (e.g., means with standard
deviations) calculated across the number of runs specifi ed by the user, each
run calculated using the same initial input conditions. Since many of the
data analyses employed by NEWGARDEN involve random or probability-
modifi ed processing (e.g., exactly which allele for a locus from a source
population will be chosen as one of the alleles of a founder; if selfi ng rate
is set to 0.5, exactly which matings are selfi ngs is determined according
to a probability function), there will be variability from run to run in the
conditions for each generation. The user can specify the number of replicate
runs, and NEWGARDEN will report the mean and standard deviation of
the output data, enabling one to determine whether two mean values are
statistically different when comparing two trials in which input conditions
differ. For example, setting for a given trial
<Number_Runs value=“25”/>