The heritability of size in a wild annual plant population with hierarchical size structure

The relative magnitude of additive genetic versus residual variation for fitness traits is important in models for predicting the rate of evolution and population persistence in response to changes in the environment. In many annual plants, lifetime reproductive fitness is correlated with end-of-season plant biomass, which can vary significantly from plant to plant in the same population. We measured end-of-season plant biomasses and obtained SNP genotypes of plants in a dense, natural population of the annual plant species Impatiens capensis with hierarchical size structure. These data were used to estimate the amount of heritable variation for position in the size hierarchy and for plant biomass. Additive genetic variance for position in the size hierarchy and plant biomass were both significantly different from zero. These results are discussed in relationship to theory for the heritability of fitness in natural populations and ecological factors that potentially influence heritable ..., Study population
The study population of Impatiens capensis is in Glen Sutton, Quebec, Canada (45o 02’ 37” N, 72o 32’ 57” W). The plants occur in damp soil within an irregularly shaped area of ca. 150 m2, beneath a canopy of a mixed, mature deciduous-evergreen (Acer saccharum-Tsuga canadensis) forest. I. capensis plants in this population form nearly pure stands that emerge as a near continuous carpet of seedlings on the forest floor. The density of individuals remains high (ca. 200-250 per m2) at the end of the season. Early season seedling density was at least twice as high. In I. capensis, the Pearson correlation between chasmogamous seed production and end of season biomass is r = 0.95, and between overall seed production and biomass is r = 0.92 (Waller, 1979).  Small plants have been shown to produce no chasmogamous flowers or fruit at all (Waller, 1979), thus making position in the size hierarchy an interesting fitness component for study.
Impatiens capensis reference genome
From ..., LDAK v. 5.2 package of programs (https://dougspeed.com/ldak/).
STACKS version 2.60
bwakit v. 0.7.12 a
SAMtools v. 1.13
R version 4.1.1
vcfR v. 1.12 (an R package)
SNPfiltR v. 1.01 (an R package)
Plink v. 1.9, \**­­­­Title of Data Set: ** Heritability of fitness in a wild annual plant population with hierarchical size structure (*Note: This data set was updated on 19 June 2024, after discovering several quality control issues with the genomic data. We apologize for any inconvenience*).

This data set includes measures of plant weight (fresh biomass in g) from a sample of 97 plants collected in three quadrats in the study population at random (random sample), and from 367 plants collected in five additional quadrats where large and small plants were sampled (extreme sample).

The 367 plants in the extreme sample were genotyped using genotyping-by-sequencing, and the vcf files for these plants and their SNP genotypes are also included in this DRYAD repository. The BAM files used for constructing this vcf file along with the *Impatiens capensis* reference genome are deposited in GenBank under SRA accession number PRJNA945897.

**Description of the data and file structure**

File: *Impatiens_cape...