The enhancement of biodiversity is an important strategy to improve the structure and functioning of mono culture plantations. However, compared with seedling transplanting, there is limited information about theutilization of soil seedbanks in regenerating plantation forests. In the present study, to investigate the potentialapplication of soil seedbanks in plantation forest regeneration, the topsoil (0–10 cm) of natural forests wastranslocated to difffferent monoculture plantations, namely, Acacia crassicarpa, Castanopsis hystrix and Eucalyptusurophylla monocultures. Seed germination, seedling growth and related environmental conditions of the plan tation forests were monitored in the experiment. Although, at the very start, large numbers of seedlings emergedfrom the soil seedbank, only nine species survived after 2.5 years, including seven tree species and two shrubspecies. Notably, Machilus chekiangensis, a tree species with high economic value, was established in the plan tation forests. Except for the common species that emerged in the three plantations, there were some specialspecies that were only associated with a specifific plantation. Redundancy analysis revealed that nitrogen fromboth the natural forest and plantation forest soil had signifificant effffects on seedlings growth. However, en vironmental conditions such as light (reflflected by leaf area index), soil temperature, moisture and pH showed noobvious inflfluence on seedling growth. Our study suggests that soil seedbank translocation from a natural forestto a plantation forest can be a useful approach for plantation forest regeneration because it could introducevaluable plant species and improve the plant biodiversity.