ARGscape: A modular, interactive tool for manipulation of spatiotemporal ancestral recombination graphs.

Abstract

Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) are increasingly central to modern population genetics, yet ARG-based methods for spatiotemporal demographic inference remain underutilized in empirical settings due to fragmented workflows and a lack of exploratory tools. ARGscape addresses this by providing a unified framework, seamlessly integrating established and novel tools for ARG simulation, manipulation, and spatiotemporal inference into both graphical and command-line interfaces. ARGscape features dynamic 2- and 3-dimensional visualizations and a novel "spatial diff" visualization for quantitative comparison of ARG-based geographic inference methods. By integrating these various functionalities, ARGscape facilitates novel data exploration and hypothesis generation, bridging the gap between methods development and empirical adoption, and enabling educational uses. ARGscape is available as a Python package on PyPI and as a live website for educational and simple demonstrative purposes at https://www.argscape.com. The source code and documentation are available on GitHub at https://github.com/chris-a-talbot/argscape. Supplementary data is available at Bioinformatics online.