Ecosystems Disturbance Recovery: What It Was or What It Could Have Been?

The time it takes for an ecosystem to recover from a disturbance is a key to environmental management. Conventionally, recovery is defined as a return to the pre-disturbance state, assuming ecosystem stationarity. However, this view does not account for the impact of external forces like climate change, imposing non-stationarity and trends. Alternatively, the counterfactual approach views recovery as the state the ecosystem would have achieved if the disturbance had not occurred, accounting for external forces. Here, we present a simple method to estimate the counterfactual recovery time. By implementing our method to the greening of the Arctic region, we showed that counterfactual greening recovery is twice as long as conventional recovery over the region. We argue that the well-documented greening of the region acts as an external force, leading to such a large difference. We advocate for embracing the counterfactual definition of recovery, as it aligns with realistic decision-making processes.