Responses of Soil Properties and Bacterial Community to the Application of Sulfur Fertilizers in Black and Sandy Soils

Sulfur (S) is an essential nutrient element for crops and plays an important role in regulating and controlling the growth and development of plants. However, there are few studies on the effects of inorganic S fertilizer on soil bacterial community structure and the relationship between these communities and soil properties in the main corn producing areas of Jilin Province, China. This study evaluated the effects of applying different levels of ammonium sulfate fertilizers (S0, S30, S90, S150) on soil properties and bacterial communities. The results revealed that S fertilizer treatment increased the available sulfur (AS) content in soil and reduced soil pH, soil organic matter (OM) as compared with S0 treatment. S fertilizer treatment increased the bacterial richness of black soil (Chao1) and reduced the bacterial richness of sandy soil. In addition, the application of S fertilizer significantly changed the soil bacterial community structure and it was revealed that S fertilizer have different effect on black and sandy soil bacterial communities. Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) indicated that the S treatment changed the structure of bacterial community and Redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that soil pH and AS were major variables affecting the structure of soil bacterial community.