Simulation results

In simulations using with complete sampling of candidate fathers, true fathers had mean posterior probabilities of 0.993, with a minimum in any simulation of 0.984, indicating that the marker set used here has high statistical power to resolve relationships. However, when no information about dispersal is included in paternity analysis, the remaining uncertainty about paternity causes apparent distance between mates to be inflated by approximately 40m, regardless of the true dispersal distance (figure \ref{173111}A, left-most panel). This bias increases to several hundred metres when sampling of fathers is incomplete as paternity is incorrectly assigned to unrelated individuals further from the mother, inflating the tail of the dispersal kernel (figure \ref{173111}A).
In contrast, when dispersal is inferred jointly with paternity, the inferred shape parameter values of the dispersal kernel are close to the true value of one (figure \ref{173111}B). In fact, when sampling of father is complete, the shape parameter is somewhat inflated (i.e. the pollen dispersal kernel is inferred to decay more rapidly than the exponential distribution). This inflation decreases as the proportion of missing fathers increases, and begins to underestimate the shape parameter of the dispersal kernel when many fathers are unsampled.