Data from: Heritability estimates from genome wide relatedness matrices in wild populations: application to a passerine, using a small sample size

Genomic developments have empowered the investigation of heritability in
wild populations directly from genome wide relatedness matrices (GRM).
Such GRM based approaches can in particular be used to improve or
substitute approaches based on social pedigree (PED-social). However,
measuring heritability from GRM in the wild has not been widely applied
yet, especially using small samples and in non-model species. Here, we
estimated heritability for four quantitative traits (tarsus length, wing
length, bill length and body mass), using PED-social and a pedigree
corrected by genetic data (PED-corrected) and GRM from a small sample (n =
494) of blue tits from natural populations in Corsica genotyped at nearly
50,000 filtered SNPs derived from RAD-seq. We also measured genetic
correlations among traits and we performed chromosome partitioning.
Heritability estimates were slightly higher when using GRM compared to
PED-social, and PED-corrected yielded intermediate values, suggesting a
minor underestimation of heritability in PED-social due to incorrect
pedigree links, including extra-pair paternity, and to lower information
content than the GRM. Genetic correlations among traits were similar
between PED-social and GRM but credible intervals were very large in both
cases, suggesting a lack of power for this small dataset. Although a
positive linear relationship was found between the number of genes per
chromosomes and the chromosome heritability for tarsus length, chromosome
partitioning similarly showed a lack of power for the three other traits.
We discuss the usefulness and limitations of the quantitative genetic
inferences based on genomic data in small samples from wild populations.