2.4.4 Disturbance history
These data have previously been used to reconstruct disturbance histories throughout the Carpathians (for details, see Svoboda et al 2014; Schurman et al. 2018). In brief, tree growth series are scanned for decadal-scale growth rate anomalies indicative of the rapid reductions in competition that occur following disturbance. Gap sizes created by the historical event are inferred from the present canopy area of the released individual. Thus, if multiple co-occurring individuals were released during the same year, then their collective canopy areas are summed to estimate the gap fraction created by the disturbance event in a given year. For the present analysis, we extracted four disturbance history variables for each plot: the severity and time elapsed since each inventory plot’s most severe disturbance (used in our longer-term analysis of synchrony) and the severity and time elapsed since each inventory plot’s most recent disturbance (used in our analysis of near-term mean BAIs).