Abstract:This study was conducted to evaluated the immediate influence of surface wildfire on the soil archaeal community structure in a shrubbery. Burned soils were sampled 18 hours after a shrubbery fire in Yumin county of Xinjiang, Northwest China, and control soils were sampled from a unbured shrubbery next to the fire-impacted areas. Two archaeal 16S rDNA gene clone libraries were generated from total genomic DNA in the two soils. Nineteen archaeal operation taxonomic units (OTUs) were obtained from the two soils clone libraries by restriction fragment length polymorphism（RFLP）analyis, and nine of them were only detected in the unburned soils and accounted for 5.91% of total clones, being absent in the burned soils. Three dominant archaeal taxonomic units YMar-F25(GQ304791), YMar-F32(GQ304792) and YMar-F21(GQ304789) fell into subgroupⅠof Crenarchaeota, accounting for 15.50%, 18.18% and 41.36% of the total clones respectively in the unburned soil library. Immediately after the fire, the three taxonomic units were still dominant in the burned soil library, accounting for 15.59%, 22.58% and 46.24%. Shannon-Wiener index of unburned soil archaeal 16S rDNA gene clone library was 1.87, and the burned soil library was 1.40. The results suggested when the time after high severity shrubbery fire was at hourly scale, diversity of soil archaea was lower in burned site than the control site, groups of archaea with low abundance were more sensitive to fire disturbance than those with high abundance. Community structure of the groups with high abundance was not altered significantly after fire.