Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> Continued deforestation of tropical rainforest for agricultural purposes (such as setting up rubber and oil palm plantation) has continuously led to global warming. Such landscapes warrant immediate restoration. It is widely assumed that community assembly should form the basis for performing tropical forest restoration. Yet, how it could be applied to guide tropical forest restoration remains poorly understood. To address this challenge, we have developed different strategies that were derived by investigating various community assembly mechanisms, which include, abiotic filtering, niche-based competition, and exclusion of weaker competitors. In a > 30-years long effort, first, we determined the mechanisms that dominate the community assembly across different spatial scales in a primary tropical lowland rainforest in Hainan Island of China. For this purpose, a 15-ha natural forest area was investigated at spatial scales of 400, 900, 1600, 2500 and 10000 m <sup>2</sup> . Then, the outcomes of this investigation were used to develop a restoration strategy for reforesting 400 ha of aged rubber plantations. By using our restoration, 98.37% of original rubber plantation has been replaced by a high-diversity (198 local tree species) tropical rainforest whose dominant tree species is local dominant tree species ( <italic>vatica mangachapoi</italic> ). This restoration outcome is the best as the most dominant tree species in globally existed rubber plantation restoration projects which do not use scale-dependent community assembly mechanisms remain rubber plantation. Thus, the frame-work provided here is highly effective for guiding future restoration of global degraded tropical rainforests which in turn facilitate restricting the global warming to below 2°C. </p>