The limiting behaviour of a mainland-island metapopulation

Stochastic patch occupancy models (SPOMs) are a class of discrete time Markov chains used to model the presence/absence of a population in a collection of habitat patches. This class of model is popular with ecologists due to its ability to incorporate important factors of the habitat patch network such as connectivity and distance between patches as well as heterogeneity in patch characteristics. We present an asymptotic examination of a simple type of SPOM called the mainland-island model. In this model a single patch called the mainland is connected to a large number of smaller patches called islands and each island is only connected to the mainland. We discuss the limiting behaviour of the SPOM as the number of islands increases and the size of the islands decrease relative to the mainland. We demonstrate that a variety of limiting behaviours is possible depending on the scaling of the island size and on the heterogeneity of habitat quality.