Hamid led a study that explores traditional vs. counterfactual views on ecosystem recovery in the age of climate change.
Traditionally, recovery means bouncing back to a pre-disturbance state. The problem? It assumes a stable ecosystem, but climate change and other interventions like management can introduce non-stationarity and trends.
We propose a counterfactual approach: what would the ecosystem look like if the disturbance hadn’t happened? This lets us see the recovery process along with dynamics imposed by other forces like disturbances.
We used data-driven time series impact analyses on Landsat satellite data to estimate counterfactual recovery, revealing Arctic post-fire greening took twice as long to recover compared to traditional views!
Read the paper here: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109219
