salmonnb: a program for computing cohort‐specific effective population sizes (Nb) in Pacific salmon and other semelparous species using the temporal method

We describe a new method and a computer program salmonn b to calculate the effective number of breeders (N_b) per year in semelparous species with variable age at maturity. The existing temporal method for the ‘salmon’ life history produces an estimate of the harmonic mean N_b in the two sampled years. salmonn b reads genotypic data in standard formats and computes yearly N_b values by combining information from pairwise comparisons of samples taken in 3 or more years. Simulations show that the new method produces unbiased estimates of yearly N_b, and precision is inversely proportional to true effective size.