Vermicomposting and anaerobic digestion - viable alternative options for terrestrial weed management - A review

Abstract

The management of terrestrial weed is of great concern for the scientific community as these weeds cause adverse effect in different ecosystems like forest, agriculture and urban. The widespread of these weeds by their adaptive capability and morphological advancement is difficult to control. Parthenium hysterophorous, Lantana camara, Saccharum spontaneum, Ageratum conyzoides are the weeds that spread all over the world. There are various management practices employed for the control of this weeds. But all of these practices have some drawbacks those are neither environment friendly nor economical. In this paper a review has been done to evaluate various alternative management practices for these terrestrial weeds and to analyze their feasibility. Vermicomposting and anaerobic digestion can be viable alternative option which is cost effective as well. There are few studies regarding vermicomposting and anaerobic digestions of terrestrial weeds are done.

Keywords: Allelopathy; Anaerobic digestion; Biogas; Terrestrial weeds; Vermicomposting.

Fig. 1

The current global spreading of L. c a m a r a taken from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility 2007. Red dots show existence records of L. camara.

Fig. 2

This figure was reported by [42]. Black color area represent the distribution of P. hysterophorous.

Fig. 3

S. spontaeneum.