The program STRUCTURE does not reliably recover the correct population structure when sampling is uneven: sub-sampling and new estimators alleviate the problem

Inferences of population structure and more precisely the identification of genetically homogeneous groups of individuals are essential to the fields of ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation biology. Such population structure inferences are routinely investigated via the program STRUCTURE implementing a Bayesian algorithm to identify groups of individuals at Hardy-Weinberg and linkage equilibrium. While the method is performing relatively well under various population models with even sampling between subpopulations, the robustness of the method to uneven sample size between subpopulations and/or hierarchical levels of population structure has not yet been tested despite being commonly encountered in empirical datasets. In this study, I used simulated and empirical microsatellite datasets to investigate the impact of uneven sample size between subpopulations and/or hierarchical levels of population structure on the detected population structure. The results demonstrated that u...