A metagenomic analysis was performed on the soil samples from Poa alpigena grassland in the Sanjiangyuan region of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. The metagenomic results were studied to understand the effect of vegetation change on microbes in Poa alpigena grassland soil. A total of 62,724 ORFs with an average length of 188.9 bp were identified. The sequences were divided into different groups of NCBI taxonomy database and SSUrRNA database. Moreover, unigenes highly enriched in “translation, ribosomal structure and biogenesis functions” (115, 18.7 %), “Transcription” (61, 0.10 %), “Amino acid transport and metabolism (51, 0.08 %)” and “Signal transduction mechanisms” (34, 0.06 %). Using KEGG analysis, we found that a large amount of genes were involved in “Biosynthesis of secondary metabolites”, “Microbial metabolism in diverse environments”, “Bacterial secretion system”, Carbon metabolism and Amino acid metabolism, indicating that annotated unigenes might involve in the metabolic pathways in the response in soil restoration.