Since its GitHub release in 2018, visPedigree has been
used in livestock breeding, conservation genetics, human genealogy, and
large-scale pedigree research. This page includes only applications
documented in a paper’s methods, supplementary material, or source code;
citation alone is not treated as evidence of use.
Evidence last reviewed: July 2026.
Featured applications
Eastern black rhinoceros
Natural dispersal is better than translocation for reducing risks of inbreeding depression in eastern black rhinoceros
PNAS, 2025
Documented use: Constructed observational pedigrees for each geographic location and used those pedigrees to classify ancestry cohorts.
Historical human populations
The long-lasting legacy of reproduction: lifetime reproductive success shapes expected genetic contributions of humans after 10 generations
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2023
Documented use: Traced deceased descendants and quantified whether they continued the lineage, did not reproduce in the population, or emigrated.
Labrador Retriever
1,486,764
pedigree records
randPedPCA: rapid approximation of principal components from large pedigrees
Genetics Selection Evolution, 2025
Documented use: Used to locate the two individuals involved in pedigree loops; both loops were subsequently traced to incorrect sire assignments.
Verified publications using visPedigree
The entries below are ordered by year. Each use statement is based on an explicit methods or results statement in the linked source.
2025
Mellya, R. V. K., et al.
Natural dispersal is
better than translocation for reducing risks of inbreeding depression in
eastern black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis michaeli).
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(23),
e2414412122.
Verified use: Construction of observational pedigrees for each geographic location; the pedigrees were then used with known migration and translocation histories to classify ancestry cohorts (Methods, p. 9).
Lee, H., Craddock, R. F., Gorjanc, G., & Becher,
H.
randPedPCA: rapid
approximation of principal components from large pedigrees.
Genetics Selection Evolution, 57, 46.
Verified use: Used to locate the two individuals involved in pedigree loops among 1,486,764 Labrador Retriever records. Both loops were subsequently traced to incorrect sire assignments (Results).
Ferdosi, M. H., & Johnston, D.
Identification
of relationships and pedigree simplification using graph theory.
Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Animal
Breeding and Genetics, 26, 303–306.
Verified use: Plotting of the 15-individual test
pedigree shown in Figure 1. The graph-theory analysis itself used
igraph, not visPedigree (Methods,
p. 304).
2024
Arias, K. D., et al.
Population dynamics of
potentially harmful haplotypes: a pedigree analysis.
BMC
Genomics, 25, 487.
Verified use: Visualization of a pedigree containing 471 Gochu Asturcelta pigs from 51 families (Methods, “Pedigree, cohorts and genotyping”).
2023
Young, E. A., Chesterton, E., Lummaa, V., Postma, E., &
Dugdale, H. L.
The long-lasting legacy of
reproduction: lifetime reproductive success shapes expected genetic
contributions of humans after 10 generations.
Proceedings of
the Royal Society B, 290(1998), 20230287.
Verified use: Tracing of deceased descendants to classify lineage continuation, non-reproduction, and emigration (Methods, section 2(d)).
Jones, T. B., Manseau, M., Merriell, B., Pittoello, G.,
Hervieux, D., & Wilson, P. J.
Novel multilayer
network analysis to assess variation in the spatial co-occurrences of
close kin in wild caribou populations.
Global Ecology and
Conservation, 47, e02688.
Verified use: Construction and visualization of pedigrees after parentage inference with COLONY. Those pedigrees supported classification of first-, second-, and third-order relationships for downstream network analysis (Methods, section 2.2).
Vander Jagt, C. J., et al.
Investigating
the genetic cause of wry face in Australian Jersey cattle.
Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Animal
Breeding and Genetics, 25, 238–241.
Verified use: Visualization of the pedigree used in
an investigation of common ancestors among Jersey cattle affected by wry
face. The paper attributes common-ancestor identification to manual
investigation and custom scripts, not to visPedigree (Methods,
p. 239).
2022
Arias, K. D., et al.
Understanding
Mendelian errors in SNP arrays data using a Gochu Asturcelta pig
pedigree: genomic alterations, family size and calling errors.
Scientific Reports, 12, 19686.
Verified use: Visualization of the Gochu Asturcelta pedigree presented in Figure 1 of the Mendelian-error study (Methods, “Basic statistical analyses and visualization of data”).
2021
León Rubio, J., da Silva Faria, R., Infante Gonzalez, J.,
Rincón Lozano, Y., & Dominguez-Castaño, P.
Genealogical analyses in
open population of Silla Argentino horses belonging to the national
police of Colombia.
SPERMOVA, 11(2), 166–172.
Verified use: Preparation of pedigree data for a total population of 1,861 Silla Argentino horses. Population parameters and genetic-diversity statistics were subsequently calculated with ENDOG (Methods, full text).
Software integrations
MoBPS
The MoBPS function get.pedigree.visual() directly calls
visPedigree::tidyped() and
visPedigree::visped() to prepare and visualize
pedigrees.
Ecosystem recognition
CRAN Task View: Agricultural Science
The CRAN Task
View: Agricultural Science lists visPedigree in its
Animal Science section as a package for visualizing complex animal
pedigrees. This is ecosystem recognition, not a publication or CRAN
endorsement.
Using visPedigree in your research?
If visPedigree contributes to published work, please
cite the package. Run the following command for the citation associated
with the installed version:
citation("visPedigree")For version 1.9.0:
Luan, S. (2026). visPedigree: Tidying, Analysis, and Fast Visualization of Animal and Plant Pedigrees. R package version 1.9.0. https://github.com/luansheng/visPedigree.