Abstract: In January 2008, southern China suffered an unusual heavy snowstorm an d freezing rain over a large area for almost a month long. This catastrophic eve nt was the worst one in past 50 years, which brought the area a serious impact o n the infrastructure, ecology, and environment. To understand the long-term imp act of this catastrophic event on the forest ecosystems in this area, a field in vestigation was conducted on the soil fauna in a pure Chinese fir plantation and a mixed Chinese fir plantation-alder plantation in Huitong County of Hunan Pro vince on March 23, 2008, the date 40 days after the heavy snowstorm and freezing rain. With the abundance and community composition as the main parameters and t he monitoring data from the two plantations on March 23, 2007 as the reference, the flexibility and resistance of soil fauna to the disturbances of the catastro phic event was preliminarily evaluated. The results showed that there was a sign ificant deviation of soil fauna communities in the two plantations from the refe rence. An outbreak increase in microfauna nematode abundance was found from 122 169 ind·m-2 to 1183439 ind·m-2 in pure Chinese fir plantation and from 254359 ind·m-2 to 845730 ind·m-2 in mixed Chinese fir plantation-alder plantation, while a 270% and 856% decrease of macrofau na abundance was found in the two plantations, respectively, compared with the r eference. Mesofauna abundance also had a significant decrease in litter layer bu t not in soil. The abundance recovery displayed a trend from quick rate for micr ofauna to slow rate for macrofauna, w hich indicated that the soil fauna functional groups, in terms of body size, cou ld be used as a vulnerable indicator in evaluating disturbance event and post-d isturbance recovery. By using community ordinations, no shift in soil fauna comm unity composition was detected 40 days after the catastrophic event, suggesting that the community composition of soil invertebrate had a high resistance to cat astrophic snowstorm and freezing rain disturbances.