Effective population sizes: missing measures and missing concepts

Genetic diversity within a population is a critical parameter for conservation biologists to assess. One approach for examining genetic diversity is through the determination of effective population sizes. Animal Conservation recently published a review of genetic approaches for estimating effective population sizes. We felt this review was incomplete both methodologically and conceptually. Here we extend that review to include coalescent‐based approaches for estimating effective population sizes. We then discuss different kinds of effective population sizes, including inbreeding, variance and eigenvalue effective sizes.