Tea Bag Index Revisited: Risks of Misleading Decomposition Patterns
1Kyushu Research Center, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, FFPRI, Kumamoto, Japan.
Ecology Letters
|April 18, 2025
Abstract:
This study shows that recent global analyses using the Tea Bag Index (TBI) are influenced by methodological flaws: (1) the interdependence of stabilisation factor (S) and decomposition constant (k) biases correlation analysis, (2) derivation of S and k from separate decomposition curves causes their decoupling, and most importantly, (3) the determination of k is inaccurate.


