Where does compartment collide?

In ecology, a compartment is a subset of species within a food web whose feeding interactions are concentrated among themselves and only weakly linked to the rest of the web, so the system is partly divided into semi-isolated blocks. Pimm and Lawton's 1980 Are food webs divided into compartments? tested whether real food webs show this modular structure and what it would mean for stability. The referent is an abstract, functionally bounded subsystem defined by the pattern of interactions rather than by physical walls, differing from a fascia-bounded anatomical space.[1]

Unit

The degree to which interactions cluster within subsets of a network rather than across it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified by compartmentalisation or modularity indices computed from the network of feeding links

In immunology, a compartment is a functionally distinct pool of lymphocytes, such as the naive or memory pool, whose size is independently regulated and maintained by competition for survival signals and space. Freitas and Rocha's 2000 Population biology of lymphocytes: The flight for survival treats these pools as separately controlled populations held near a set size. The referent is a regulated cell population defined by state and niche rather than a bounded physical cavity, closer to the ecological subsystem meaning than to the anatomical one, though it is its own construct.[2]

Unit

The regulated size and composition of a defined lymphocyte pool

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by cell counts and phenotyping of each pool and by its return toward set size after depletion or expansion