Strong earthquake could cause a variety of secondary geological disasters,and severely damage ecological environment.After earthquake,the vulnerable and sensitive ecosystems are going through a series of vegetation restoration and soil succession.Of this,vegetation recovery was regarded as the core of reconstruction of ecological restoration.However,the current research mainly focused on the investigation,recovery and reconstruction of the ecosystem damage from a macro perspective.Research in regard to the relationship between vegetation and soil microbial was rarely reported.Fuyun earthquake fault zone is located in Fuyun county of Altay in Xinjiang,which was caused by a serious earthquake of 8 scales on August 11,1931 and formed a 176 km long rift.It was one of the rare earthquake fault zones in the world.The aim of this study therefore was to investigate the effect of secondary plants on soil archaeal communities in the secondary barren of Fuyun seismic fault zone in Xinjiang.In a 300×30m range(collapse region was long and narrow),8 different plants were selected as dominant plant species after investigation.They were Salix vistita,Salix rectijulis,Eremopyrum orientale,Seriphidium nitrosum,Geranium sibiricum,Spiraea media,Galium verum and Rosa spinosissima.The rhizosphere soils collected from the 8 different plants were studied by testing soil chemical properties(mainly include soil organic matter,pH,total nitrogen,available nitrogen,available phosphorus and available potassium) and soil archaeal community structures were surveyed by employing Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism(T-RFLP).Unplanted soil in the same depth served as control.The results showed that the soil in study site was alkaline(pH=8.28—8.51).The soil nutrient contents in Eremopyrum orientale′s rhizosphere were generally higher compared with other plant.There were great differences in soil nutrient content among samples,but the overall trend was the nutrients in most plants′ rhizosphere soil was significantly(P0.05) higher than control.Archaeal 16S rDNA fragments could be amplified only in the rhizosphere soils.The diversity indices(include richness,Shannon-Weiner index,Simpson index and evenness) were vary with different enzymes digestion.The similarities of archaeal communities calculated by the Sorensen formula were low among different rhizosphere soils and most numerous were in Geranium sibiricum′s rhizosphere with 18 species and minimum were in Seriphidium nitrosum with 2 species.Crenarchaeota and Euryarchaeota were the main possible archaeal groups identified by MiCA(Microbial Community Analysis) online analysis.Canonical correspondence analysis(CCA) showed that soil organic matter,available phosphorus,total nitrogen and pH can significantly affect the archaeal communities.Especially soil organic matter had the greatest impact on the distribution of dominant archaeal groups(HhaⅠ digestion: r=0.94;RsaⅠ digestion: r=0.74).Correlation analysis showed that soil available phosphorus content was positively correlated with all diversity indices of archaeal communities(P0.05),and total nitrogen content showed a significant positive correlation(P0.05) to the evenness index in HhaⅠdigestion.These results indicated that recovery of vegetation not only could affect archaeal communities′ composition,structure and distribution in earthquake fault zone of Xinjiang,but also could improve the soil fertility and possible reasons were related to rhizosphere′s chemical properties.