Germ banks affect the inference of past demographic events

Continuous progress in empirical population genetics based on whole genome polymorphism data requires the theoretical analysis of refined models in order to interpret the evolutionary history of populations with adequate accuracy. Recent studies focus prevalently on the aspects of demography and adaptation, whereas age-structure (e.g. in plants via the maintenance of seed banks) has attracted less attention. Germ banking, i.e. seed or egg dormancy, is a prevalent and important life-history trait in plants and invertebrates, which buffers against environmental variability and modulates species extinction in fragmented habitats. Within this study, we investigate the combined effect of germ banking and time-varying population size on the neutral coalescent, and particularly derive the allele frequency spectrum under some simplifying assumptions. We then perform an ABC analysis using two simple demographic scenarios - a population expansion and an instantaneous decline. We demonstrate the a...