Remnant trees have great ecological importance in post-disturbance forest landscape recovery which is strongly affected by their spatial configuration. Location and abundance, the two key attributes of spatial configuration, often act jointly, but their relative roles have rarely been investigated. Here, we spatially reconstructed a 300-year time series (1710–2010) of the post-volcanic-eruption forest landscape in Changbai Mountain. We designed a factorial experiment for location (expected vs random) and abundance (expected vs 50–100 % increase) of remnant trees to quantify their relative effects on forest recovery at landscape level and by species. Results showed that random location and increased abundance had significantly higher total basal area than that with the expected location and expected abundance in most simulation periods (P < 0.01). Location of remnant trees had greater effects on total basal area (more than twofold) and landscape pattern (measured by aggregation index) than abundance. Meanwhile, abundance of remnant trees displayed larger effects (～or > 50 %) on the importance of coniferous species and large-seeded hardwood species. Abundance also played a greater role on the coverage area of the late-successional species. Our study could provide important management implications that planting individual patches in a dispersed pattern and increasing the abundance of late-successional species can best facilitate the recovery in a disturbed forest landscape.