“…The Nowacki and Abrams (1997) criteria for overstory oak have been among the most thoroughly investigated, and validation studies have shown that peak radial growth response corresponds to the disturbance date, and that the magnitude of release response, in terms of percent-growth change, corresponds to the degree of crown release (Rentch et al, 2002(Rentch et al, , 2003. An extension of the running mean techniques, the boundary line release criteria proposed by Black and Abrams (2003) incorporates the effects of prior growth history, in an attempt to better standardize releases across various age, crown, and size classes and potentially species (Splechtna et al, 2005;Nagel et al, 2007;Bhuta et al, 2009). In the recently developed ''absolute increase'' method, the release threshold for a species is set in terms of absolute growth rate, which indirectly incorporates the effects of prior growth rate and species on release magnitude (Fraver and White, 2005).…”