Wyatt Hartman Receives Dean’s Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper

Hartman, a PhD student, was honored for a landmark study of wetland soil bacterial populations he wrote with his advisor, Curtis J. Richardson, professor of resource ecology and director of the Duke University Wetland Center.

Their study was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2008. It reported the novel finding that restoring degraded wetlands—especially those that had been converted into farm fields—actually decreases their soil bacterial diversity.

“It sounds counter-intuitive, but our study shows that in restored wetlands, decreased soil bacterial diversity represents a return to biological health,” Hartman says. That’s the opposite of the response seen in terrestrial ecosystems, where restoration improves conditions from a more barren, degraded state, he notes.

The Dean’s Award is an initiative developed by Chameides to recognize outstanding student scholarship. It is awarded each year to a student enrolled in the Nicholas School PhD programs who has a manuscript accepted or published by a peer-reviewed journal.  Manuscripts are judged on disciplinary rigor, originality and likely depth of contribution to the advancement of their field.

Award recipients receive a $3,000 prize and their name is placed on the plaque hung in Hug Commons.

In his winning paper, Hartman found that one of the simplest and most promising indicators of restoration success was the ratio of Proteobacteria, which have the highest affinity for nutrient-rich environments, to Acidobacteria, which have the highest tolerance for poor conditions. 

While more than half of original wetland acreage in the United States has been destroyed or degraded, tens of
thousands of hectares have been restored in recent decades as a result of the federal government’s “no net loss” policy.

“Re-establishment of microbial communities indicates a restoration of the biological functions of soils. This study across a wide range of wetlands is the first to establish that shifts in soil bacteria populations may be a key marker of restoration success,” Richardson says.

Rytas Vilgalys, professor of biology at Duke, and Gregory L. Bruland, assistant professor of soil and water conservation at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, were co-authors on the paper. The study was funded by a Duke University Wetland Center Case Studies Endowment and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.