Bangladesh: Sunamganj Loluar Chor, Milon bazaar, Alpona Dash (32)

Photo: Simon B. Opladen
Helvetas
Publication article

Reading tea leaves worldwide: Decoupled drivers of initial litter decomposition mass‐loss rate and stabilization

The breakdown of plant material fuels soil functioning and biodiversity. Currently, process understanding of global decomposition patterns and the drivers of such patterns are hampered by the lack of coherent large-scale datasets. The authors buried 36,000 individual litterbags (tea bags) worldwide and found an overall negative correlation between initial mass-loss rates and stabilization factors of plant-derived carbon, using the Tea Bag Index (TBI). Learn more.

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