  In this paper, we study the relationship between certain stochastic and
deterministic versions of Hanski's incidence function model and the spatially
realistic Levins model. We show that the stochastic version can be well
approximated in a certain sense by the deterministic version when the number of
habitat patches is large, provided that the presence or absence of individuals
in a given patch is influenced by a large number of other patches. Explicit
bounds on the deviation between the stochastic and deterministic models are
given.
