Abstract: The essence of desertification is that soil quality deteriorates. Loss of soil materials, soil physical and chemical properties, deterioration of biological characteristics and the changing of soil structure are the principal features. The previous degrees and nature of soil desertification have important effects on the process of vegetation recovery and the direction of succession after land is abandoned. To develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between plant and soil environmental factors under different thicknesses of sand bed, we studied the relationship between plant distribution, diversity and major soil factors with the changing of surface sand bed thickness in space by redundancy analysis, taking a recovered grassland on abandoned cultivated land in the desert steppe region of Ningxia as the test area. With an increase of sand bed thickness, the Lespedeza bicolor plant community was substituted by that of Sophora alopecuroides, and the importance of L. bicolor decreased from 0.334 to 0.104 while the importance value of S. alopecuroides increased from 0 to 0.404. The plant diversity index of Margalef, Shannon-Wiener and Pielou were correspondingly increased: the plant diversity index of Margalef increased from 0.32 to 0.79, that of Shannon-Wiener from 0.13 to 0.40,and that of Pielou from 0.11 to 0.22. The main significant soil environment factors affecting plant distribution and diversity were soil salt and calcium carbonate in the 0-10 cm soil layer and soil calcium carbonate in the 10-40 cm soil layer. The change of soil calcium carbonate content on the surface represented the degree of desertification and the stage of degeneration of the zonal sierozem. At present, the form of plant distribution patterns on recovered grassland in abandoned lands, was mainly the result of adaptability of species diffusing and randomly competing under the given constraints of a specific state of soil degradation. The crucial factors were the direct or indirect effects of surface soil environmental factors decided by sand bed thickness, although the direct action of soil nutrients for vegetation were not fully reflected.