Grassland is the primary vegetation type throughout the world, and covers approximately 40% of land in China, most of which has been damaged because of intensive livestock use or mowing. The management of grassland is in need of tools to diagnose the state of the vegetation, and for this reason, ecologists have begun to study plant functional traits. Among plant functional traits, specific leaf area (SLA, the ratio of leaf area to leaf dry mass), leaf dry matter content (LDMC, the ratio of leaf dry mass fresh mass) and leaf nitrogen concentration (LNC) appear to be associated with plant growth and nutrition cycles.Numerous experiments have tested the effect of grazing and mowing on grassland function and structure, few attempts focusing on grassland that have been taken out of grazing or mowing. In this study, three types of sites were selected in different management areas:the control site affected by grazing and hay harvesting, the site with no grazing, and the site lacking grazing and hay harvesting. Within each site, community characteristics were investigated in August of 2012 and 2013. The leaf traits measured included; SLA, LDMC, and LNC of 14-15 of the most dominant species in each site. Our main goals in this study were to examine:1) whether removal of the disturbance had a significant effect on soil and community productivity, 2) how plant leaf functional traits are affected by reduced disturbances at the species, functional group, and community level, and 3) the sensitivity of specific leaf area(SLA) and leaf dry matter content (LDMC) to the removal of disturbances.The results showed that the removal of a disturbance had significant effects on plant leaf traits and community structure but not on soil or community productivity. Most of species in control site had low SLA, which indicated species usually avoided grazing on the Inner Mongolia steppe. Leaf traits of species belonging to different functional groups responded differently to the removal of disturbances. There was no change in the SLA and LDMC of any perennial forbs when grazing was removed. LDMC and LNC of perennial grasses did not change in response to the removal of disturbances, while SLA of the species from these functional groups changed significantly after the disturbance removal. The LNC of annual herb increased when there was a removal of grazing and hay harvesting. At the community level, the control site had the lowest community-aggregated SLA value, which was due to a lower SLA in its dominant functional group (perennial grass), while the remove grazing and hay harvesting site had the highest overall community LNC value. In addition, it was easy to distinguish perennial grasses and forbs by the LDMC values, and SLA was more sensitive to the reduction of disturbances than the LDMC at the species, functional group, and community levels.