Abstract:Fire is one of the main disturbance factors for ecosystems, which directly affects the diversity of ground-dwelling soil fauna. This study aimed to examine the restoration of the ground-dwelling soil arthropods community in the burned area in The Daxing′anling Range. We investigated the ground-dwelling soil arthropod communities by pitfall traps in the Larix gmelinii - Betula platyphylla mixed forest at the locations suffered and not suffered the severe fire at all in the year 2006 at Songling in June and August ten years later (2016). Totally, we collected 17 460 individuals that belonged to 5 classes, 14 orders, 57 families, 85 genera (Appendix) in the burned and unburned sites. Of our collections, 55 genera were macro soil arthropods, belonged to 4 classes, 11 orders, 36 families, included 1 dominant group (Tetramorium); 30 genera were meso/micro soil arthropods, belonged to 2 classes, 3 orders, 18 families, included 1 dominant group (Hypogastrura). In general, the total number of ground-dwelling soil arthropods in the sampling site suffered severely burned was higher than that in the unburned sites. However, the individuals of soil macro arthropods in burned site were significantly less than that in the control site (P < 0.05). The ratio of meso/micro soil arthropods collected in August was significantly higher than that collected in June (P < 0.05). The diversity analysis showed that the ground-dwelling soil arthropods had no significant difference in the diversity indexes between severe burned and unburned sites (P > 0.05). Compared with August, the Shannon-Wiener index, Pielou evenness index and Margalef richness index of soil meso/micro arthropods (Table 2) were significantly lower in June, while Simpson dominance index was higher (P < 0.01). The Jaccard coefficient of soil arthropods in the burned and unburned sites was 0.78, and this value was 0.43 between June and August, which means the composition of ground-dwelling soil arthropods community has a little variance, but it changes with time. Soil arthropods had significant differences in the utilization of resources in the study area (P < 0.01), the types of resource were an increase in severely burned sites and a decrease in control. Thus, the dominant phenomenon was obvious, and the niche overlap index of major soil arthropod groups was increased due to the addition of available resources. Typical discriminant analysis (Fig. 1) showed that the ground-dwelling soil arthropod community was affected by the fire, and the affected degree was obvious change with seasons.