Introduction

Monitoring and maintaining genetic variation within breeding populations is essential for the long-term success of animal breeding and conservation programmes. Many farm animal breeds have typically relatively low effective population sizes leading to genetic drift and therefore loss of genetic variation over generations. Reduced genetic variation likely leads to a reduction in future genetic gain as well as adaptive potential. Current breeding programmes have been successful, but this has partly been achieved at the cost of increased rates of inbreeding and higher loses of genetic variation than necessary.

EVA (EVolutionary Algorithms) is software for monitoring inbreeding and optimizing breeding recommendations for populations with both discrete and overlapping generations. EVA is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It can be run from a terminal window/command prompt or from R-scripts. EVA can be used to describe a population in terms of inbreeding coefficients, pedigree completeness, genetic relationships and realized genetic contributions. In addition, EVA is a tool for optimising selection and mating choices by computing optimal genetic contributions of sires and dams. This makes EVA a useful tool for management of populations with small effective population sizes. EVA is freely available via NordGen’s website.

• The main goals of the workshop are:
  • To introduce the theory and implementation of Optimum Contribution Selection in sustainable management of breeding and conservation programmes.
  • To promote independent use of EVA software with hands-on exercises.

To maximize the learning experience, participants are expected to be familiar with basic theory of breeding programmes, have downloaded EVA and made sure it is working before attending the workshop, as well as having installed the most recent version of R-studio if you wish to run EVA by use of R-scripts.

Please, notice that participants will be registered on a “first-come-first-served” basis. However, priority will be given to participants from Nordic and Baltic Countries. Registration deadline is the 24^th of October 2019.