In order to discuss the change of soil animal communities in different burned areas and restore the forest ecosystem after fire,this study used soil animals in different burned forest areas as investigation objects,to analyzed the diversity of soil animal communities both horizontally and vertically by combining field investigation and indoor experiment.The diversity of soil animal communities in the Great Xing'an Mountains was studied through the analysis of five burned areas of different years together with an unburned area.The results showed that the diversity,individual number and richness index of macro-soil animals in different layers had the consistent changing tendency after forest fire,i.e.,each increased rapidly soon after fire,then rose steadily and finally approached to the indexes of those in the unburned areas.The individual number,DIC index,richness index and dominance index of meso-micro soil animals all displayed a tendency of rapid increase at the early restoration stage,then a slow growth in the following if the influence of the maximum data in the 8 years burned area was excluded.Vertically speaking,the individual number,DIC and richness index of macro-soil animals maximized in the range of 0~5 cm,and decreased respectively in upward and downward directions,while those indexes of the meso-micro soil animals maximized in the litter layers and decreased sharply downward.The relative analyses indicated that the individual number and the richness index of the macro and meso-micro soil animals both had high correlation with the DIC diversity index.The community similarity analysis showd that the soil animal communities in different burned areas had high comparability based on Jaccard index.Fig 1,Tab 3,Ref 26