By analyzing herbivore systems at different levels, Brown and Allen have complicated the meaning of the term compensation that its usefulness might be called into question. However, those complications were there all along, and have been the source of confusion and misdirected altercation in the literature. Brown and Allen think compensation is a helpful term and recommend that it be kept in ecological parlance. It is, in fact, no more confused a term than others, like competition, disturbance, stress, invasion, or predation, all of which change their specific meaning with a change in level. It is characteristic of important words in ecology, that they apply to many conceptual or spatio-temporal levels. Organisms, populations, communities, or ecosystems can all suffer stress. Neighborhood competition is not homologous with population competition, it is analogous. Similarly, compensation can be measured with many observation protocols, the time and space characteristics of which determine the level of discourse. In using the term compensation, Brown and Allen suggest we must be explicit as to the level in question and careful in our choice of measurement units.
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