The neutral metacommunity model can be considered as a coarse-grained version of Hubbell’s neutral model. As in the Hubbell model, no traits are assigned to species apart from their index, so they are all equivalent. The nodes of the lattice in the metacommunity model are habitats instead of sites for individuals and therefore host a fixed number (>1) of populations. Populations are not assigned a population size, but are simply present or absent.