Talk:Minimum viable population

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Page scope

Minimum viable population covers the minimum viable population: its definition and the criteria behind it, the genetic thresholds of the 50/500 rule and their revisions, the attempts to find a figure that holds across species, its use in Red List and Convention on Biological Diversity assessment, and how far it has reached plants, crops, landraces and cannabis. The theory of effective size, its estimation and the numbers grown at each regrowing of a stored cannabis accession belong to Effective population size. The modelling method belongs to Population viability analysis. Inbreeding depression, drift and bottlenecks as mechanisms belong to Inbreeding depression, Genetic drift and Population bottleneck. How many plants a collector samples belongs to Germplasm sampling.

Data verification

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Discussion

Sources

Flather, Hayward, Beissinger and Stephens (2011), Trends in Ecology & Evolution 26: 307–316: Shaffer's definition and criteria, the methods, the figures of Reed and colleagues (2003) and Traill and colleagues (2010), the critique of a single figure, legislation.
Brook, Traill and Bradshaw (2006), Ecology Letters 9: 375–382; Traill, Bradshaw and Brook (2007), Biological Conservation 139: 159–166: the two cross-species analyses.
Frankham, Bradshaw and Brook (2014), Biological Conservation 170: 56–63: the 50/500 rule, its revision to 100/1000, the Red List thresholds, the standard of 99 per cent over 40 generations.
Pérez-Pereira, Wang, Quesada and Caballero (2022), Biodiversity and Conservation 31: 2763–2780: the origin of the 50 and 500 values and the simulations with purging. The correction of 2023 (vol. 32, pp. 4141–4149) adds supplementary material only.
Hoban and colleagues (2020), Biological Conservation 248: 108654; Gargiulo and colleagues (2024): the indicators of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Kunming-Montreal framework.
Food and Agriculture Organization (2014), Genebank Standards, p. 10; Welling and colleagues (2016); Lemeshev, Rumyantseva and Clarke (1995): gene banks and cannabis.

Works cited through other sources

Shaffer's definition of 1981 is quoted as Flather and colleagues give it (p. 308), with his "tentatively and arbitrarily". The mean of 7,316 and the phrase "approximately 7000 adult vertebrates" of Reed and colleagues (2003) come from Flather and colleagues' Table 1 (p. 309), and the phrase "at least 5000 adult individuals" of Traill and colleagues (2010) from p. 307. The proposals of Franklin and of Soulé (1980) are given as Frankham and colleagues (2014, p. 57) and Pérez-Pereira and colleagues (2022) describe them. The Clarkia pulchella result is Newman and Pilson's (1997), as Frankham and colleagues report it (p. 58). The position of Jamieson and Allendorf (2012) is as Frankham and colleagues state it (pp. 57–58). Gilpin and Soulé (1986) are named for the extinction vortex by Frankham and colleagues (p. 57).

Cannabis

None of the sources gives a minimum viable population for any cannabis population, or compares the effective size of a cannabis landrace or feral population with the 50/500 or 100/1000 thresholds. The cannabis figure in the article, 1,000 plants per regrowing at the Vavilov Institute, is a gene bank standard set by the share of an accession's gene pool to be kept. Of the two cross-species analyses, Brook and colleagues (2006) analysed 30 plant species and Traill and colleagues (2007) 22.

Figures in Traill and colleagues

The median of 4,169 (95 per cent interval 3,577 to 5,129) is for all 212 species after standardisation to a 99 per cent chance of persisting for 40 generations; the median of the published values before standardisation was 3,299. The figures for plants, mammals and birds are the standardised medians of their Table 2 (p. 164).