As a bridge connecting plants and the external environment, leaves can coordinate each anatomical traits to deal with the adverse effects of extrinsic factors on plant growth. Therefore, variation in leaf anatomical traits reflecting the adaptation strategies of plants to the environmental changes. In this study, the leaves of 115 common plants (including monocotyledonous plants, dicotyledonous plants, woody plants and herbaceous plants four functional types of plants) from different vegetation zones (including forest-steppe, steppe and desert-steppe) on the Loess Plateau were sampled, and the leaf anatomical traits (including epidermal tissue thickness, palisade tissue thickness, sponge tissue thickness, mesophyll tissue thickness and leaf thickness) were measured by using paraffin sectioning technique and optical microscopy technique. We aimed to examine the variation in leaf anatomical traits and their relationships with the each species' relative dominance within communities of different vegetation zones, in order to provide theoretical basis for vegetation restoration and ecological environment improvement on the Loess Plateau. Our results showed that, except mesophyll tissue thickness, other six parameters of anatomical traits increased from forest-steppe to steppe and desert-steppe, indicating that the xerophytic characters of leaves became more obvious in these habitats which had less precipitation. Moreover, the environmental influences on leaf anatomical traits differed among different plant growth and cotyledon types. The palisade tissue thickness and palisade-spongy tissue thickness ratio were significantly negatively correlated with precipitation and soil nutrients for both herbaceous and woody species (P<0.05). However, the epidermis tissue thickness of herbs was only significantly negatively correlated with soil nutrients (P<0.05), and the mesophyll tissue thickness of woody species was significantly negatively correlated with precipitation (P<0.05). For dicotyledons, the thickness parameters of anatomical traits (expect for sponge tissue thickness and mesophyll tissue thickness) were significantly negatively correlated with precipitation and soil nutrients (P<0.05). However, environmental factors didn't exert significant influences on the leaf anatomical traits of monocotyledons (P>0.05). In addition, the relationships between leaf anatomical traits and species' dominance differed among different vegetation zones. Specifically, the species dominance was significantly negatively correlated with mesophyll tissue thickness and leaf thickness in forest-steppe (P<0.05), indicating that these plants with thin-leaves were more competitive than those plants with thick leaves in this zone. In desert-steppe, there was a significantly positive correlation between species dominance and palisade tissue thickness, which suggests that stronger photosynthetic capacity the species had, higher competitiveness they could own (P<0.05). However, no significant correlation between species dominance and leaf anatomical traits was observed in steppe (P>0.05).