Analytical methods for a stochastic mainland–island metapopulation model

We study a class of chain-binomial metapopulation models, giving special attention to the ‘mainland–island’ configuration, where patches receive immigrants from an external source. We evaluate the distribution of the number n t of occupied patches at any census time t and establish a law of large numbers that identifies a deterministic trajectory which can be used to approximate the process when the number of patches is large. We also establish a central limit law, which shows that the fluctuations about this trajectory are approximately normally distributed. We describe briefly much finer results that can be used for model calibration.