Identifying natural selection in wild plant populations is a challenging task, as the reliability of selection coefficients depends, among other factors, on the critical assumption of data independence. While rarely examined, selection coefficients may be influenced by the spatial and genetic dependence among plants, which violates the independence criterion, leading to biased selection estimates. In this study, we examine the extent to which frugivore-mediated selection coefficients are influenced by spatial and genetic information. We used Generalized Additive Models to deal with spatial and relatedness issues. We compared the fit of the Lande and Arnold multivariate model with models including spatial, genetic relatedness, and spatial + genetic relatedness corrections. Our results indicate that fit in standard models was substantially increased after including the spatial structure. Likewise, the model including the genetic relatedness accounted for a variance fraction not explained by spatial structure, which permitted the identification of significant selection acting upon fruit size, a trait not detected under selection otherwise, and dealt better with autocorrelation that any other model. The model including spatial and genetic effects altogether accounted for 65% of the variance, compared to 13% of the standard model. The spatial structure and genetic relatedness played an important role in this system. As genetic effects revealed significant selection upon fruit traits otherwise hidden under standard selection estimates, field studies that control for plant dependency may provide more realistic selection estimates in natural plant populations.

中文翻译：

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考虑相关性和空间结构以改善野生植物表型选择

识别野生植物种群的自然选择是一项具有挑战性的任务，因为选择系数的可靠性取决于数据独立性的关键假设等因素。虽然很少检查，选择系数可能会受到植物之间空间和遗传依赖性的影响，这违反了独立性标准，导致选择估计有偏差。在这项研究中，我们检查了食果动物介导的选择系数受空间和遗传信息影响的程度。我们使用广义加性模型来处理空间和相关性问题。我们将 Lande 和 Arnold 多元模型的拟合与包括空间、遗传相关性和空间 + 遗传相关性校正的模型进行了比较。我们的结果表明，在包含空间结构后，标准模型的拟合度大大提高。同样，包括遗传相关性的模型解释了空间结构无法解释的方差分数，这允许识别对果实大小起作用的显着选择，否则在选择下未检测到的性状，并且比任何其他模型更好地处理自相关。包含空间和遗传效应的模型总共占方差的 65%，而标准模型的比例为 13%。空间结构和遗传相关性在该系统中起重要作用。由于遗传效应揭示了对水果性状的重大选择，否则隐藏在标准选择估计中，