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Breeding programmes are key for managing and improving populations in agriculture, wild, or captivity. This hybrid unique course shows how to use the latest research to design a new, or upgrade an existing, breeding programme using (big-)data and data science. It achieves this by first, introducing the basic principles of modelling breeding programmes and basic usage of R (highly transferable skills), particularly the package AlphaSimR (available at CRAN https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/AlphaSimR/index.html). Secondly, the accompanying online material showcases real life case studies of using AlphaSimR to effectively model breeding programmes for livestock, crop, insect and managed wild or captive populations. Particular attention will be given to model how Ne changes according to different breeding programmes.