Wetlands provide many important ecosystem services to human society. Thus, urban wetland park construction aiming at a simultaneous increase in nutrient retention and species diversity in urban area has recently become applied as a compensation measure for past disorder exploitation and activities. A lack of information on ecological function and process of wetlands, especially mechanism of plant diversity maintain, has restricted development of wetland park in urban. To fill this information gap, soil characteristics were correlated with plant species diversity in Changzhi Urban Wetland Park,located in southeast Shanxi, China. The occurrence and distribution of herbaceous plants were investigated on 225 plots along 15 transects in the waterside zone . The occurrence and distribution of herbaceous plants were investigated on 225 plots along 15 transects in the waterside zone . The relationship between the distribution and abundance of herbaceous species and environmental gradients was analyzed using the canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) ordination method. Forward selection and Monte Carlo permutation test were used to select the factors significantly determine the herbaceous plant distribution. Partial CCA (PCCA) was also performed to partition the variance that was explainable by factors studied. There are 20 species were observed in the studying area, belonging to 13 families and 20 genus, and most of them are hygrophytes and mesophytes. In order of the important value (IV), the dominant species are Phragmites, Typha, Poa, Scripus and Xanthium. Increasing trends in species richness, Shannon-Weiner information, Simposon Index and Pielou uniformity with increasing distance from water were observed. Overall the community showed low species diversity. Forward selection and Monte Carlo test suggested that soil nitrogen and soil moisture were the most important factors determining plant distribution. PCCA revealed that soil nitrogen and soil moisture explained 1.7% and 1.4% of variance in the distribution of herbaceous plants. However, the fact that majority of the variance was unaccounted for by the factors studied suggests that other factors we did not measure could play a vital role in determining the occurrence and distribution of herbaceous plants in the waterside zone, e.g., interspecific competition, water level fluctuation, human activities and random events.