Abstract:

Spartina alterniflora (Smooth Cordgrass),a perennial and deeprooted saltmarsh plant, is introduced to China by ChungHsin Chung at Nanjing University in 1979,and has been expanding rapidly in intertidal flats of coastland of China ever since.Invasion and excessive spread of Spartina alterniflora have led to seriously environmental and ecological problems,and its negative influences have drawn extensive concerns.As a result,Spartina alterniflora is considered as one of the bioinvasion species by State Environmental Protection Administration of China in 2003,which is the only coastal salt marsh plant.Due to its fast growth,stronger reproductive ability,higher biomass and no competition with food,Spartina alterniflora is a good species for bioenergy production.Anaerobic digestion technology is increasingly important for waste management as it leads to environmental benefits with regard to waste treatment,pollution reduction,energy production and improvements in agricultural practices.For this reason,researchers have done many works on anaerobic biogasification of Spartina alterniflora.However,there were not many literatures related to anaerobic digestion of Spartina alterniflora  and the earliest paper on anaerobic digestion of Spartina alterniflora was 2006.Many studies showed that there were only two research teams doing this work,one was Nanjing university and the other was Tongji university.Most of papers on anaerobic digestion of Spartina alterniflora were published in Chinese,indicating that the ecological and environmental problems caused by the invasions of Spartina alterniflora were more serious in China.In this paper,the recent research review about anaerobic digestion of Spartina alterniflora was summarized,including physicochemical properties of Spartina alterniflora,advantages,disadvantages,feasibility and research progress of anaerobic digestion of Spartina alterniflora and future research priorities.In the part of research progress of anaerobic digestion of Spartina alterniflora,Spartina alterniflora directly used for biogas production,fermentation process control,pretreatment of Spartina alterniflora,codigestion of Spartina alterniflora and other organic wastes and advanced biogas production were included.Although much research showed that Spartina alterniflora was a good substrate for biogas production,there were still much challenges on anaerobic digestion process of Spartina alterniflora.In this paper,the future research on anaerobic digestion of Spartina alterniflora were discussed,including the elimination of sodium inhibit,harvest machine,anaerobic digestion process,correlative engineering equipment and longlasting operation and management mechanism